The Faces of Angels (40 page)

I can't stop looking at it. I am vaguely aware of people, Pallioti and some others I don't know. They're looking too. Pierangelo, panting from having chased me, comes up the steps behind me.

‘Mary.'

He touches my shoulder, but I shrug him away. Then I call her name.

It's a garbled murmur at first, nothing more than a combination of sounds. Then it's a word. And finally a scream. A long, thin wail as I run towards her, my feet skidding on the grass, my hands stretching out as if even now I can reach her in time, somehow pull her back.

Pierangelo grabs me, as does another policeman. They hold my arms while I shriek at Pallioti; the thing that has been twisting and writhing in my stomach finally bursting free, exploding up through my throat and out of my mouth. ‘
Credimi adesso?
' I scream. ‘
Credimi adesso?
' Now do you believe me?

Billy is lying on what looks like a smouldering bonfire. Half-burnt branches, sticks and leaves are piled underneath her. The smell of gasoline hangs in the air, and the skirt of her flowered pinafore is in tatters, half burnt, half ripped. Her painted sneakers are still on her feet.

I concentrate on them because I don't want to look at the rest of her. I don't want to see that her throat has been cut in a slash so deep her head is almost severed. That it hangs backwards and sideways at a horrible angle, and that even that is not the worst thing. The worst thing is her hair. It's been shorn. Tufted and scarred, Billy's scalp is naked.

Robbed of her golden halo, she looks like a filthy plucked bird. Her hands hang down at her sides, frail and useless, her heart ring nothing but a spot of green and pink amidst the grime. And on her shoulder there is an obscene bulge. A fat, red silk bag pinned to the rags of her dress.

Afterwards, time slides. It slips like oily string. And every time I try to pin down a thought or a word, it slithers away. Everything divides, shimmers and rolls off, like the globules of mercury we used to play with in High School science class, back before they figured out it wormed its way into your brain and killed you.

One of the mercury blobs is Billy's arm. In it I see her wrist, her hand and her painted nails. In another I see her mottled filthy legs. In another, the tatters of her pinafore dress. And a silver sky that turns the colour of apricots. And dirty smoke in the morning air. And after that, fireworks; the hiss and crack of rockets that shoot into the Easter sky and blossom, bright blue, green and red, shedding their petals in a shower of sparks over the Duomo.

I understand that this is due to the drugs, this mixed-up sense of smell and sight and sound, and that it's to be expected. Lack of clarity, after all, is the point. Sometimes, Piero says, it's better not to feel or think for a while, so as soon as we got back to the apartment a friend of his who is a doctor came right over with the pills. I have three bottles, each a different colour. Brown for sleep. Pink for calm. White for amnesia.

While the rest of Florence has Easter lunch, the police go to our apartment on Via Sassinelli. They dust for prints and find nothing, and come to Pierangelo's to talk to me. I tell them how Billy bought her clothes and shoes in the market, and how she painted her nails, and went to the party in the Piazza Santo Spirito looking like a ballerina. I tell them about the Bargello and the text message on my phone and the birdseed. I repeat every detail over and over again, until the globs of mercury get all mixed up in my head and finally Pierangelo asks the police to leave.

That night it rains. Heavy splashes hit the long windows and wash down the skylights above the sunken bath. Lying beside Piero in the dark, waiting for the pills to work, I think we're in a ship at sea that's hit a storm. I can almost feel us pitch and roll. The pills aren't working. I get up and take another from the brown bottle, and when I wake up it's almost noon on Monday and the rain has stopped. Piero is in his study. He turns when I come to the door, his hands poised over the keyboard of his computer, and all I have to do is look at his face to know what he's writing.

‘I'm sorry,' he says. ‘But someone has to, and it's better if it's me.' He's right, of course, it is. And besides, in the beginning, back with Eleanora Darnelli where all this started, it was his story.

He watches me for a second, his eyes clouded with a concern that I both want and don't want. Want because I would like to climb into his lap and hide like a child, and don't want because it makes me uneasy, as if I might be crazy or dying. I glance around the room, fishing for a topic.

‘These are nice.' I point to a series of photos of the twins as little girls. I must've seen them before, but I don't remember. ‘Did you take them?'

He shakes his head, as relieved by this effort at normality as I am. ‘Monika. She was the shutterbug in the family. Actually,' he adds, ‘that's how we met. On a shoot.'

I take the frame down. It's a collage, kind of, one of those big frames with square and oval holes in the matting. Holding it, I feel as if I'm staring through the windows of a building into other people's lives.

The twins ride ponies, dress in school uniforms, wear party hats. In one picture they climb on a younger Pierangelo, who is laughing and fending them off. In another a pretty blonde woman crouches down with her arms around them. She wears a swirly Pucci dress and she looks a lot like Catherine Deneuve, or she would except for the fact that her left eyelid is half closed and the left corner of her mouth dragged downwards in a grimace by a scar that runs from her eyebrow to her chin. Can this be Monika? Surely I would have known, if she was disfigured?

‘Is this Monika?' I hold the frame out and he looks, shakes his head and laughs.

‘No. I don't have any pictures of her.' Pierangelo takes the big frame from me and peers at where I point. ‘That's Angelina's godmother, an old friend of Monika's.'

‘What's her name?' He looks at me for a second before he places the frame back on the shelf, and I already know the answer. I can feel it. ‘That's Ottavia, isn't it?' The cigarette case and lighter. Pierangelo stares at the picture for a second and finally nods.

‘Yes.'

‘What happened to her?'

‘An accident.' He shrugs. ‘She was lucky to keep the eye. It was a long time ago.'

I let it drop. Today I'm really not much interested in Pierangelo's old girlfriends. Instead, I find myself thinking about Billy. Looking at the twins and wondering what she looked like when she was a kid.

‘Get the picture from Pallioti,' I tell Pierangelo. ‘For the paper. Don't use her university pass or anything like that. They look like mugshots. She'd hate it.' He nods, and takes my hand, holds it against his cheek, and doesn't need to ask who I'm talking about.

A couple of hours later, Pallioti sends a car to bring me to the Questura, the police headquarters. They need to talk to me, he says, if I'm ready.

Easter Monday is a big holiday. People throng the sidewalks and the streets. They walk arm in arm, eating ice cream and showing off their new spring clothes. In the Piazza della Repubblica the carousel spins and the painted horses rear and charge. Four women sit in a pink boat shaped like a shell, their mouths open, twisted by laughter I can't hear behind the sealed windows of the car. Boys in leather jackets stroll in front of us, looking like Mercutio and Romeo out to pick a fight with Tybalt. The driver puts his siren on and flashes his lights, and we nudge our way through bodies that bend like corn in the summer wind to let us pass.

Today Pallioti is different. I'm not sure what I expect from him, but when he sits down opposite me in the interview room, there's no special familiarity. If, forty-eight hours ago in the Bargello, he felt like my father confessor, now he feels like a stranger. Or a policeman. His lizard eyes are empty. Clear as glass, all they give back is a reflection of what looks in, and suddenly, more than anything else, even more than seeing Billy's body, this frightens me. I feel the way a vampire must feel when it looks in the mirror and sees nothing. Sitting here in this interview room opposite Ispettore Pallioti, it's almost possible to convince myself that I don't exist.

The woman who sits beside him, however, is different. Plump as a ripe fruit, with pampered middle-aged skin and the kind of dark red hair that has nothing to do with nature, she regards me with open curiosity. Her name is Francesca Giusti, and she's the investigating magistrate who is handling Ginevra Montelleone's case, and Billy's. She smiles at me as Pallioti opens the file that lies on the table between us.

‘Signora Warren,' Pallioti says, ‘as we established on Friday, you entered Italy on Alitalia flight 557, from New York to Milan, on the first of March this year, using a passport in your unmarried name. Since then you have been enrolled as a student at the Florence Academy for Adult Education, and have been living in an apartment in the Palazzo Sassinelli owned by Signor and Signora Bardino, which you shared with Signora Kalczeska.'

This isn't a question, but I nod anyways. Dottoressa Giusti and Pallioti regard me silently for a moment. Then Pallioti says, ‘I have to tell you, signora, I'm disappointed. On Friday, you asked for my help. I would have thought you might at least have also told me the truth.'

‘What?'

I'm not sure I've heard him right, but before I can say anything else Pallioti jams a cigarette between his lips, gets up, opens the door of the room and vanishes. A second later he's back.

‘You should know,' he says, as the door swings shut behind him, ‘that yesterday we removed this from a bureau in the bedroom of the apartment you shared with Signora Kalczeska.' He holds the manila envelope in both hands, carefully, as if it might contain anthrax powder, or a bomb. ‘So,' he says, ‘perhaps you would like to explain?'

Even with my brain fogged up by the pills, I realize what the problem is. He's in a snit because I didn't tell him about the envelope. Probably he was made to look like an ass when it was found in my drawer and he didn't know anything about it. Or he thinks I was holding out on him deliberately, that somehow I haven't been straight with him because I didn't share my fetish for the dead. Or both. Compared to everything else, it seems so minor I almost laugh.

‘It's nothing. Just some things I kept.' Pallioti fixes me with his lizard look, unimpressed.

‘Look, I'm sorry,' I add. ‘It was personal. I honestly forgot,' I say, lamely. I start to add that on Friday I didn't even think about it. It didn't seem relevant. But now, in light of what's happened, it's such a stupid remark, I don't even bother. The fact that it's the truth hardly matters.

Pallioti sits down, and there's a minute of silence while all three of us look at the envelope.

‘Really,' I say again. ‘I'm sorry. I should have told you. It didn't seem important to me at the time.' I feel as if I'm confessing to keeping sex toys. Although the reality may be worse. Sex toys are common. Pictures of murdered women I imagined I communed with aren't. A flush of shame creeps up my neck.