The Faces of Angels (48 page)

Rosa puts her knitting in her lap and her head swings round. Suddenly she reminds me of a snapping turtle I saw in the woods behind my grandparents' farm in Pennsylvania when I was little. It was huge, so big it looked as if I could ride on it. Its neck was crêpey and old, its beak nose pointed, but its eyes were bright and black and shiny, just like the ones that stare at me now.

‘She didn't work that park,' Rosa says. ‘Never.' Her hand comes down on the wood of the bench, flat and hard. ‘She wasn't stupid, and she wasn't a streetwalker. She took bookings. She didn't need the extra. I told the police that too. You hear what I'm saying?'

‘What about her man?'

Rosa makes a sour face. ‘She didn't have no man,' she says. ‘Didn't need one. She had a client list. Like I said, she was high class. She didn't work the streets.'

‘And that night, New Year's Eve—'

Rosa cuts me off, waving her hand. ‘She didn't share details with me. I was her mother. I watch Carlo.' I feel myself colour. Rosa reaches out and pats my knee. ‘We were going to Mass,' she says. ‘New Year's Day at the cathedral. My girl loved God. She used to say he was her best friend. I told the policeman that,' she adds, ‘not that he cared, the cold-eyed son of a bitch.'

I see my white-tiled hospital room, and the quick image of a lizard sitting on a rock.

‘Pallioti?'

‘Yeah,' Rosa nods. ‘That was the name. Of all of them, he was the only one who didn't ask me about sex. From the looks of him,' she adds, ‘he probably doesn't know what it is. Men like that, they hatch from eggs.'

‘Did she have a priest? A regular confessor?'

‘
Certo
,' Rosa nods, her eyes distant. ‘Father Donati. He went to the seminary with my cousin. Afterwards, you know, he went right to the police and told them everything he could think of, said the confessional wasn't so sacred after she was dead. He told me too, but it didn't help. He always absolved her,' she adds. ‘He made sure she got to heaven, where she belongs.'

Hearing this, I'm pretty sure my next question is pointless, but I ask about Rinaldo anyways, and Opus Dei. Rosa shakes her head. She's never heard of Rinaldo, and Opus, she says, well, from what she's heard, they only like fancy people. Finally I pull out the picture of Kirk, but I draw a blank there too. Rosa's never seen him before, but, like she said, the police took her daughter's papers, her calendar. Told her they'd traced all of her clients, not that Rosa believes it. She hands the picture back.

‘You think he did it?'

I look at the three of us, me and Henry and Kirk, sitting in the bar and shake my head. ‘I did, I think. Now, I really don't know.'

Somehow I can't imagine Kirk cruising hookers on New Year's Eve. It just doesn't feel right.

Rosa tucks her knitting into her bag, and stands up. One arm of the small blue sweater hangs over the edge.

‘There are evil people in this world,' she announces, ‘and most of them are men.' She reaches out and pats the top of my head. ‘We, none of us, can do anything about it,
piccola
,' she says. Then she adds, ‘I just don't want Carlo to be one of them.'

Rosa Fusarno's hard calloused palm rests for a moment on my head. Then she picks up her bag and begins to walk away, shuffling slightly in her flat shoes. Other women are standing up now too. The men fold their newspapers. She is maybe ten yards away, her square, squat, flowered back to me, when she turns round.

‘In America,' Rosa calls, ‘at least use her name right. She changed it to Caterina, but I baptized her Martina. You call her that, you call her Martina Fusarno.'

A sense of dejection stays with me all the way home, and finally I get off the bus early and decide to walk. I was so sure I was right, so certain that the link between Billy and Caterina and Ginevra was me, that I had all but convinced myself that it had to be Kirk, or maybe even Rinaldo, or Opus Dei, something—anything, anyone—I could identify, if only I looked in the right place and asked the right questions. So much for that. Maybe Rosa's right, and this is all random. We believe in cause, in chains of logic, or even God, because it gives us some sense of control. But maybe we live at the mercy of the butterfly's wing, after all. Chaos theory. A tiny breath of air shifts halfway across the world and, bingo, your life is changed for ever.

A dog barks, the high excited yip of a terrier, and I turn a corner and realize I'm closer to Santa Maria Novella than I thought. A group of students comes along the sidewalk and splits, flowing around me, their laughter ringing like a peal of bells. I turn another corner, then the next, until, without really being aware of it, I'm facing the building where Ty and I lived.

The front door opens, and a young woman comes out pushing a baby carriage. Watching her, I can almost smell the faint whiff of mould and vegetables that always filled that stairwell, almost see the peeling paper and the mustard-coloured paint on the banister. The girl is wearing jeans and sandals, and from across the street she smiles at me, half hesitantly, as if she thinks she should recognize me. Then she tucks the baby in and starts off in the opposite direction. I watch her go, her figure getting dimmer and smaller, and for just a second I allow myself to wonder how close that came to being me.

Piero's waiting for me when I get back, and I know right away that something bad has happened. His face looks as though a shadow has fallen across it.

‘What? What is it?'

He shakes his head, as if he is trying to clear it. Then he tells me he saw a copy of Billy's autopsy report today.

‘She wasn't killed at the fort. She was placed there after. Well after.' He doesn't want to look at me. He opens the refrigerator and is fooling with something inside. ‘They're pretty sure she'd been dead for about forty-eight hours when they found her,' he says.

My mind can't seem to process this, that she died on Thursday, not Easter Sunday.

‘So I couldn't have seen her in the Bargello?' I ask stupidly.

‘No.' Pierangelo shuts the fridge. ‘Probably not. She was almost certainly dead by then.'

Of course. She was so filthy with dirt and ash from the fire, it was hard to see, but I remember the mottled skin of her legs.

I drop my bag, sink down onto one of the kitchen stools.

‘Why would anyone do that?' I ask finally. ‘Kill her, then keep her body before burning it.'

Pierangelo shakes his head. ‘He wanted her to be found on Easter morning? Resurrected? I don't know. Maybe he couldn't get in until Saturday night. Maybe he had to get ready. Who knows? You tell me.'

But I can't. All I can think is that Billy was taken somewhere, to some terrible place, and killed.

‘They looked, didn't they? After Benedetta? For where—' But I can't say the words.

‘Of course.' Pierangelo walks across the kitchen, picks up a bowl and puts it down again. ‘Everywhere,' he says. ‘They got excited, for a while, about one of the sheds, in the groves. The growers park their trucks and stuff in them, and one of them looked as if the floor might have been turned, but it was nothing. A petrol spill. Then there was an abandoned warehouse, out by the airport. A couple of the boyfriend's construction sites. But they turned out to be illegal butchering. A fight. Nothing.'

‘Do you think whoever it is took Ginevra and Billy to the same place?'

‘Yes. Probably. I don't know. Assuming he has a car, it could be anywhere.'

Pierangelo's voice drops, as if this really doesn't interest him, but he's still pacing around the kitchen, restless as a cat. He's more worked up than I am, as if we've reversed places, and I know I have to be missing something here. A cold feeling comes over me.

‘What else did the autopsy say?'

He stops and looks at me, and I know. I can see the pictures of Benedetta Lucchese's and Ginevra Montelleone's bodies. ‘How bad?' The question sounds like a rock falling into the room

‘
Cara
—' Pierangelo sounds as though he might try to say something soothing, and I wave it away. Nobody soothed Billy.

‘How bad?'

‘Bad.' He takes a breath. ‘Under her clothes,' he tells me, ‘all over her body, they found burns.'

I
READ SOMEWHERE
once that someone did a study on exactly how many babies are conceived the night after funerals. The result was ‘a lot,' and the theory was that the urge to start a new life makes up for the loss of an old one. But I'm not sure I agree. I tend to think those conceptions may in fact be the by-product of a more visceral, more furious act of defiance, a giving of the finger, so to speak, to mortality. A screeching back:
I'm alive and I'm going to stay living
! I think about this the next morning as I walk over the Ponte alle Grazie and turn towards San Niccolo.

Pallioti has deprived me of the faces in my envelope, but neither he nor anyone else can stop me from paying private calls to the dead. Behind me, on the opposite bank, is the spot where they found Ginevra. Ahead is the wine bar where she was last seen. Up the hill is the place where Benedetta vanished and, not far from that, the spot in the olive groves where she was found two days later. Almost directly above it are the walls of the ramparts where Billy's killer built her funeral pyre.

And somewhere, somewhere in this city, is the ‘in between,' the void those women were sucked into. The place where he takes them to burn, and cut, and strip the skin from their bodies.

The sun is coming out, burning off a thin scrim of clouds as I climb the steep hill beside the city walls. I meet ladies walking together, and joggers who huff and pant. Ahead, a father in a business suit gets out of a car, grabbing a briefcase in one hand and his little girl in the other. He stops to fix the ribbon on her long braid before they walk together up towards the school on Via San Leonardo, her tiny polished shoes taking two steps for every one of his.

At the top of the street I am momentarily surprised by the sight of a tour bus pulling up outside the entrance to the Belvedere. A group of people tumbles out, smiling and laughing. I didn't realize the fort was open to the public again, and then I think:
Why not?
It's Thursday. Four days since Billy was found. Plenty of time for the police to finish with the site, and for the city to clean it up. To remove all trace of her. Because for these nice people life goes on. For them, it never stopped. They trickle past me, chattering and adjusting the straps of their cameras and videos, and as I turn onto Via San Leonardo I find myself hoping they like the strange floating park and the broken-time mirror, and that the big old junk sculpture doesn't ruin their view of Florence.

No sinister black motorcycle whips past me this time. The morning is so still I can hear birdsong. Ten days ago the wisteria buds were puckered, but now they've opened and the long purple flowers reach across the tops of walls like languid hands, fingering the warm grey stones. Two elderly men come out of a gate, each with a small brown dog on a leash. Passing me in silence, they raise their hats in unison. I walk on a few yards until I'm standing outside the gates of the Lucchese house.

This is the last place Benedetta was seen alive, and I imagine her sister standing in the doorway, watching as she walked down this drive and passed into the dark. I wonder if she waved. Or called something? Perhaps if I listen, I'll hear the echo of her voice.

The gates are rusty. The ‘
Attenti Al Cane
' sign is tied on with wire, and I reach out to touch it, tracing the outline of the dog's nose with the tip of my finger. Then I hear singing and, almost as if I've conjured her, a woman appears. She's tall, thin and wearing blue jeans, and she comes around the side of the house pushing a wheelbarrow filled with brush. Her voice is slightly off pitch in the still morning air.