The Faces of Angels (59 page)

The whole morning passes. I have a bath, but when I go to get dressed I don't want to put on any of my clothes. Every time I pick something up, I think of Fabio Locci, of his big fat sweaty hands stroking the fabric, holding it up to the bulldog jowls of his face. Finally, I just wear my robe. Sophie is all over the one o'clock news bulletin, and this time her mother's here too. A huge woman in an expensive-looking suit, she grasps Little Paolo by the arm as if he's a squeegee toy and talks about her daughter. She pronounces Sophie's name with a slight lisp. It sounds like ‘Tho-fay.'

I switch the set off. I can't bear the news any more and I'm not even hungry. Eventually I go to get Billy's old books and curl up on the sofa. But sitting isn't possible either. I feel like a caged cat. I get up and riffle the pages, making the photos she used as bookmarks fall onto the floor like leaves. None of them is particularly interesting. Billy was not discriminating about what she shot and these are of our street. The sky is leaden. The wine shop man rolls down his awning, and the vegetable signora glowers, hands on her hips, her gorgeous legs protruding from her barrel-shaped mini-skirt. Standing beside her, Marcello looks like those people you see on death row in the newspaper, half smiling and desperate, his red apron binding him like a sarong. In the next picture Billy is holding a tomato in each hand, and in another she leans against the Vespa, her arms around a man and woman I don't recognize. Or do I? The picture quality is really bad. I squint and feel a pang of recognition. The guy's hair is cut too short. His shirt is too white, and the girl's jacket falls open to reveal a dowdy grey skirt and legs that look as if they've been painted beige. Rinaldo's friends. What do you know?

I flip the picture over, looking for a date mark, but before I can find it, the phone rings. It's Pallioti. They've got some mugshots he wants me to look at and they're very busy. Can he send a car to bring me to the Questura? I don't even have time to tell him about the pictures in my hand before he hangs up.

When I leave the apartment with my escort, it's ten minutes past two in the afternoon. In nine hours and fifty minutes, it will be 30 April.

The second floor, where I am taken, looks like a riot scene. A confusing number of people shout into phones and run in and out. Pallioti sees me for just a second. He nods when I show him Billy's old pictures and hands them to someone who he says will ‘take them away for comparison'. Pallioti still has the same suit on. It has ash down the front of it and his face is pasty. He looks awful, but the adrenalin flying around the place is palpable.

They've found other pictures of Locci they want me to look at. Then, Pallioti asks, would I mind going through their other crime books? Locci might have help, there might be a face I've seen. On my way down a glass-walled corridor, I glimpse Rosa Fusarno. She is sitting with a policewoman at a computer terminal, staring at photographs on a screen. The man who's with me, probably one of my ‘shadows', follows my glance and nods. He tells me they've brought everyone in. Somewhere in the building Isabella Lucchese and Ginevra Montelleone's family are also staring at screens. Gabriel Fabbiacelli's been here too, and even Eleanora's Mother Superior. And they've questioned everyone who's had access to the Sassinelli building in the last two years. Sooner or later, someone's going to recognize a face.

Someone may, but it isn't me. Finally, sometime after six, a cop I don't know says they'll have a car take me home. I have looked at the faces of so many men that my head is swimming. I can't believe there are that many people in Florence I don't know.

Pallioti has gone off to be on the news again, and when we walk back through the second floor, the riot scene has changed. Now people talk in quieter voices. They hunch over phones, tap pens on the edge of desks and don't meet each other's eyes. A big blow-up of the picture of Sophie and Little Paolo looks down on the room.

‘Thanks for these, we made copies,' the cop says when he hands me Billy's photos. We are standing in the lobby and I can see lights coming on outside.

‘Do you think you'll find her?' I know I shouldn't, but I can't help asking.

‘Sure, yes. Of course we'll find her,' he says. But he doesn't look anywhere near as confident as he sounds. He's relieved when, a second later, he gets a phone call and excuses himself, telling me my driver will be here in a minute, if I just wait.

So I do. I wait and wait. Cops fly by, still looking like pairs of mated geese, but no one comes for me, and finally I think this is ridiculous. The
passegiata
's in full swing. My ‘shadow' is probably hanging around somewhere, and the only person that anybody, certainly Fabio Locci, is thinking about is Sophie. It sure as hell isn't me. In fact, I think, as I push through the revolving door onto the street, I feel safer than I have in days.

Instinctively I start to walk towards Pierangelo's. Then I stop. He's working on tomorrow's edition and won't be back until late, if at all, and I can't face the empty apartment. I'll go crazy. If there's really nothing I can do, I'd rather do it with someone who understands what this feels like. There's a cab in the rank outside the Savoy Hotel, and I get in and give the driver Isabella Lucchese's address.

It's only after I pay and the taxi pulls away that I realize her drive is empty. It seems deeply unfair, as if she should have known I was coming, and I almost rattle the gate in frustration. Then, just as I am about to walk away, Fonzi bounds out of the shadows like a mythical wolf. He stops and looks at me and I think he's going to start to bark, but instead he glances backwards and, sure enough, Isabella emerges from the tangle of the garden.

Seeing her again, I remember what an idiot I was in the car when she drove me home, but she doesn't seem to care. When she lets me in, she even smiles.

‘I thought you might come,' she says. ‘It's hard to be alone, isn't it?'

I nod. ‘You were at the Questura.'

‘You too?' She pushes the gates closed, and as I follow her down the drive, I ask, ‘Where's your car? I thought you weren't here.'

‘In the garage. I'm getting the brakes fixed.' Any other time I might think that was funny.

The villa rises above us, the twilight making it look even bigger than it is. Its shuttered windows are blank squares, and when we come around the edge of the house the light spilling from the kitchen looks yellow and garish. Vines throw tangled shadows onto the gravel and something rustles in the heavy bank of overgrowth. Isabella goes inside without looking back, and I follow her.

‘You want wine?' she asks. The bottle is already open. She holds it up and pours me a glass I don't really want.

‘Listen, I've found something. You know about Sophie?' Of course she knows about Sophie, she was at the Questura. Isabella looks at me as though I'm stupid, but I pull Billy's pictures out anyways. ‘This is my friend, the one who was killed. I didn't know she had any connection to Opus at all, then I found this.' I put the snapshot of Billy leaning against the Vespa on the table. ‘Do you recognize either of them?'

Isabella takes the photo and holds it under the light, examining the clean-cut boy and the pale, doughy girl. She takes so long that I'm sure she's going to say yes, give me a name and a criminal record, but she shakes her head and hands it back to me. ‘Are you sure?'

She nods. ‘I've never seen either of them.'

I actually whimper with frustration.

‘Take it down to the Questura in the morning,' Isabella says. ‘Maybe they can match it.'

‘In the morning? It will be a little fucking late in the morning.' In the morning we'll find Sophie laid out in some terrible place, clutching her ghastly little present. I can't believe Isabella said such a thing. And then I remember. She doesn't know. The police haven't told anyone about the martyrs, and the time. She stares at me as I reach for the glass. Then I tell her.

When I'm finished, Isabella sinks down onto one of the old cane-seated chairs. Then she glances at the big clock above the table, and I look too. It's almost eight p.m., and I know she's thinking about Opus, I can tell by the look on her face.

‘It has to be them,' she says. ‘It just has to be.' She bangs the table with her palm making our glasses jump. ‘I've always thought, always, that they killed Benedetta. Even during Indrizzio, I had this thing in the back of my mind. I've always thought they killed her,' she says again, ‘and I've always thought they did it not too far from here. How else could they have taken her, moved her?'

I don't know, but I'm remembering something else she said.
Bonfires of the Vanities in the back garden.
Things other than books burn in fires. Clothes, for instance. Evidence. I see a map of Florence in my head, with coloured pins on it like the ones I sometimes imagine Piero stakes me out with when he asks
Where R U?
, but these pins are for the dead women.

‘Three of them,' I say, thinking out loud, ‘Benedetta, Ginevra and Billy, have been laid out, or whatever you want to call it, pretty close to here. And Benedetta and Ginevra were last seen close by too. Ginevra at that wine bar in San Niccolo.' It's not more than a five-minute walk away. ‘Eleanora and Caterina both disappeared further away. But they weren't tortured,' I go on. ‘Caterina was beaten up, but not burnt or cut or anything. They were killed where they were found, essentially. “Put to the sword.” But the others were tortured. He has to do it somewhere.'

‘Will Sophie be tortured?' Isabella's eyes don't leave my face.

‘It doesn't actually say so in any of the martyrdoms I've found, but I don't know. All we do know is that he's taken her, because he told us.' I think of Elvis and the little pile of birdseed, and try to concentrate.

‘He has to take them somewhere where he can get to them, but secluded enough so if something happens, if they scream or struggle or something, no one will hear. I think there's an Opus connection too. It's like somebody's taking
The Way
literally.' I remember what Babinellio said. ‘Martyrdom is salvation, right?' I ask her. ‘An honour, even? Like the cilice. The mortification of the flesh. This guy may think—I mean, he's crazy, clearly—but he probably thinks he's glorifying them. “It's so beautiful to be a victim.”' I quote that pearl of wisdom back to Isabella, and she nods.

‘They've searched the villa down by the Art Institute,' I add, ‘but you told me there were others.'

‘They're all used. They're Opus Dei houses,' she says. ‘People live in them, quite a lot of people. It wouldn't be possible, unless you're suggesting—?'

‘—a group effort, some organized rite?' I shake my head. I don't buy that. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that this is one person who's taken an already dangerous message and warped it out of all recognition. Run it through the zealot's prism in his head and come to the appalling logical conclusion: mortification for God is good, torture for God is better. Death best of all.

I feel suddenly exhausted. But Isabella gets up, standing in the middle of the kitchen, a pool of light at her feet.

‘There are two houses,' she says. ‘And a third place they use for teaching. Then there are the properties they have their eye on. We've been concentrating on those, because once they move in it's harder to get them out.' She thinks for a second. The clock has become like a third person in the room. Neither of us look at it. Its soft tick-tick-tick drops through the air.

‘I'm sure,' Isabella's saying, ‘at least I think—' She hurries out of the room before she can finish the sentence, and I hear papers and books being shuffled in the hall. A few seconds later, when she comes back, she has glasses on and a letter in her hand.

‘We track this,' she says. ‘We have a pressure group, and the idea is to try to stop them before they get in, because, afterwards, it's almost impossible. And I thought I remembered correctly: there is a property they're after. It's been empty for years. The family tried to give it to the city, but that didn't work out, and Opus has been trying to buy it for ages. The issue went dead about a year ago, when it looked as though an American college was going to buy it. I haven't heard much about it since, but I think it's still empty.'