The Italian Wife (33 page)

‘It’s Marchini.’

‘Right first time.’

Roberto saw the moment when the Fascist Party’s chairman let his anger trickle out through his rigid fingers and in its place seeped the realisation of what the photograph meant. Grassi started to chuckle, a thick unpleasant sound that rose to a roar of laughter. He reached over and slapped Roberto heavily on the knee.

‘
Bene, bene
,’ he said boisterously, ‘you’ve done well, Falco.’ But the deep grooves on each side of his mouth hardened and the laughter was cut off short. ‘This isn’t enough,’ he growled. ‘This proves nothing.’

A smile that didn’t even attempt to reach Roberto’s eyes pinned itself to his face. ‘There are more.’

Grassi nodded to himself, satisfied. ‘Alberto Marchini will regret this day, the perverted bastard.’ He flicked the photograph into Roberto’s lap with disgust.

Signor Marchini was Chairman Grassi’s chief assistant in the Party headquarters and was extremely efficient at his job, industrious and painstaking. He was a slender man in his forties, tall and elegant, who wore finely styled suits and possessed a soft pink complexion that belied the sharpness of his mind. He had come up through the ranks with Grassi from the early Milan days, but the trouble with having an assistant who had been with you so many years was that he knew you too well. He’d seen your mistakes. Your weaknesses. He knew where the black corners were hidden in your heart. You were at his mercy and someone like Grassi would writhe in the cold hours of the night at that thought.

Roberto was relying on it.

‘Where did you take the picture?’

‘On one of his trips to Party headquarters in Rome.’

The photograph showed Alberto Marchini wearing a brassiere on his naked chest. Not any old brassiere, nothing so banal. This one was a stripper’s brassiere of shimmering gold, with holes cut out. His nipples peeked through, painted some dark colour that didn’t show up in the black and white photograph, but which Roberto recalled all too well had been a shocking deep Chinese carmine. It had looked obscene. The man’s paper-white skin. The tawdry brassiere. His nipples glistening and coated in thick layers of red lipstick.

‘Who are they?’ Grassi jabbed a finger at the two young women with bottle-blonde hair and flesh spilling out of their tight clothes, one on each side of him, holding him up on his feet.

‘They were just cheap bar girls who worked the club. They had no idea who he was.’

‘
Bene
!’

The photograph was taken in a narrow dark street at the back of a nightclub in one of Rome’s seedier districts. Roberto had needed to use a flash but Marchini was too drunk to notice and the girls didn’t care. His button flies hung open in the picture. It wouldn’t have mattered much, not really, if it had been anyone other than Marchini. But he, of all men, had set himself above what he vigorously condemned as degeneracy. He was an avid churchgoer, a self-proclaimed moral man with a wife and six offspring, whom he held up as moral examples for the rest of the town. Daily he cursed the depravity and debauchery of the modern Italian male and urged them on to the path of sobriety and piety. His face was blurred, as if it had somehow melted in the heat of his own debauchery.

Roberto felt sorry for Marchini. Truly sorry. But nowhere near as sorry as he was feeling for Isabella right now.

‘There are more,’ he said again. ‘More revealing ones.’

‘Show me.’

The church bells started to peal at that moment and if Roberto had believed in such things, he might have taken it as warning. But he didn’t. So he shook his head, as the car purred past the hospital where the wounded from the rally field fought for life, and he gave the chairman a level stare.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Don’t be a fool, damn you. Give them to me.’

But even as he held out a hand for them, Roberto could see understanding dawn in the distrustful grey eyes. The chairman slumped back against the cream leather with a snort of annoyance.

‘What is it you want, Falco?’

‘Isabella Berotti out of the police cell.’

‘What?’

‘You ordered Colonnello Sepe to arrest her.’

‘What the police do is their affair, not mine.’

Roberto leaned closer and could see the tiny muscle at the side of Grassi’s eye jump and twitch. Not a good sign. He didn’t waste time.

‘Release Signora Berotti and the rest of the photographs will be yours. You’ll be able to make Alberto Marchini jump to your tune for as long as you like.’

Chairman Grassi stared out of the window, thinking hard, his teeth clamped together. After a full minute’s silence he turned his head.

‘So, Falco, you have become one of us. You are like Marchini. Feet of clay. No room for you on the moral heights any more.’ He gave Roberto a slow insinuating smile. ‘You use what you have to in order to get what you want.’ He laughed softly. ‘As dirty as the rest of us now.’

‘I’ve learned from an expert.’ Roberto nodded at Grassi.

Abruptly the chairman sat up, straightened his camel overcoat and black felt trilby, patting a hand on his bulky chest as though to reassure himself of who he was.

‘That girl is a bloody nuisance to me, Falco.’

Roberto held out his hand, hovering over the cream leather in invitation. ‘The photographs will be in your hands the moment she is released.’

‘To hell with you.’

‘Agreed?’

‘Yes. Agreed.’ He shook Roberto’s hand and it was all Roberto could do to stop himself slapping the soft clinging flesh away.

‘We use what we have to,’ Roberto said quietly.

The chairman laughed loudly, goading him, but Roberto banged on the glass partition.

‘Stop here,’ he ordered.

The car drifted to a halt outside the elegantly curved station building and Roberto opened the door, but instead of climbing out he swung round to Grassi.

‘Leave Signora Berotti out of this. She knows nothing about the man you are hunting. Don’t be a fool, don’t waste your time on her.’

The chairman suddenly shuddered and dragged a hand slowly down over his face, as though trying to rearrange whatever thoughts were in his head.

‘Mussolini wants heads on a platter,’ he snapped. ‘He’s demanding bodies hanging in the streets. And if I don’t bring him the traitor who plotted this assassination attempt, he will make sure that mine will be one of those bodies.’

Roberto slapped the photograph face down on the seat between them. ‘If you live by lies, Grassi, you die by lies. You should know that by now.’

He stepped out of the car.

‘Falco!’

He slammed the door.

The window rolled down. ‘She’s involved, Falco. You know it and I know it. We’ll be watching her.’ He uttered a deep humourless chuckle. ‘Perhaps that pretty head of hers on a platter will satisfy Mussolini’s thirst for blood.’

As Roberto strode away, the chairman’s voice chased after him. ‘Don’t forget the photographs, Falco.’

As dirty as the rest of us now
.

29

Isabella sat still. If she didn’t move, it didn’t hurt as much. Not her right hand which was cradled in her lap, but everything. Everything that ached inside her. She knew without a doubt that Colonnello Sepe intended to throw her to the dogs of war, to let her be torn limb from limb. Roberto was right. The town of Bellina was going to pay and the price was to be in blood.

She threaded through her mind each of the questions that Sepe had asked and thought carefully about each answer she had given, and every time she came up against the same brick wall. Why had he not once mentioned Roberto?

Why?

There were witnesses. Others must have seen him racing her away from the rally. Davide Francolini certainly did. She felt the hairs on her neck rise at the thought of Davide. He had reported her. He had to be the one who implied that the cracks in the building were her fault. That was enough to lose her her job. At the very least.

So why?

Her thoughts shredded each other as they chased through her head and she could feel the pain in her damaged hand throbbing in time with them. But physical pain was an old familiar foe that she’d learned to vanquish years ago; it held no fears for her. It strutted through her nerve-endings on a daily basis and she knew how to shut it away in a special compartment of her brain. At night it could still sink its teeth in and catch her unawares, but at night she was alone and there was no one to see her face or look into her eyes.

Finally she rose to her feet, her eyes too frightened to close because of what they might see in the darkness inside her head. Where once there had been the bright vista of a future and of boundless ambition, now there was nothing. An aching nothingness. Because there would be no future, no ambitions. It was all over. Here in this wretched cell, it all ended. A faint moan slithered around the tiled walls and it took her a full minute to realise it had come from her own mouth. She stepped up to the hefty metal door and pressed her burning cheek hard against its cold surface until it made her teeth ache.

‘Roberto,’ she murmured. ‘What are you doing? Did you put me here?’

The second the words skimmed past her lips, she wanted to snatch them back, to deny them air to breathe. She hated the treacherous whisper and hated herself for the betrayal. Yet she came back to it again and again – why was she the only one arrested?

It was as she stood there moulded against the door that a sudden thought stabbed into her mind, as silent and as lethal as an assassin’s blade.

What if he was arrested too?

Visions of truncheons descending on his broad back and crashing down on his unprotected skull flared in her head and she felt her stomach turn. She vomited on to the white tiles of the floor, too late to reach the bucket, and felt as if her innards had been wrenched out by feral claws.

‘Roberto,’ she whispered.

She heard his laugh. In her head she heard his laugh, clear and enticing.

‘Roberto,’ she howled.

He had dragged her out of the safe numb state that she had wrapped around herself like a shell, he had cracked it wide open and brought her gasping into his warm, sensitive and passionate world, but she had not been prepared for this version of love. For the craving in her body for him. For the violence of it. For the way it could stop her heart.

Colonnello Sepe stood in the cell doorway, the heel of one black boot drumming on the floor. He had thrown open the metal door with such force that it slammed back against the wall, cracking a row of tiles. Isabella had the feeling that he had hoped to catch her behind it.

‘Signora Berotti, it has been decided that you can leave.’

She stood her ground in the middle of the floor. ‘It has been decided by whom?’

‘That is not important.’

‘It is to me.’

He stared down at the spray of vomit spread out in front of her and wrinkled his nose in disgust. The silver braid on his bicorn hat and the gaudy display of medals on his bird-like chest did not distract Isabella from an awareness of the anger in him. Whoever had made this decision, it certainly wasn’t him.

Relief started small, just a trickle through her veins, but within seconds it was a torrent raging through her, deafening her ears.

‘Was it my father, Dr Cantini? she asked. ‘Was it his request for my release that —’

‘Get out!’

‘I knew he would not stand for your —’

‘Get out!’

Isabella hesitated no longer. As she strode past him his sharp hawk’s nose thrust forward as if it could barely resist tearing strips of skin off her.

Don’t limp. She raised her damaged hand and rested it on her chest, but it was her leg she was cursing. Don’t you dare limp.

The van spilled Isabella on to the pavement outside the apartment block where she lived. She had been bundled like laundry into the black van waiting in the yard at the rear of the police station and then dumped with no explanation or even any attempt at politeness.

She was surprised by the sky. It was a vast swath of lilac, shot through by vivid slashes of gold and an astonishing deep purple as the sun slid into the sea to the west of the plain. Isabella had no idea it was so late in the day. Her jailers had removed her watch and there was no window in the cell, so her only sense of time had been the one that existed in her head. As she walked into the courtyard of the apartment her elongated shadow hobbled ahead of her as though in a hurry to get indoors.

When she unlocked the door she found the rooms silent and eerily lit by pools of misty lilac light from outside, but no lamps were on in the apartment.

‘Papa?’ she said softly.

She didn’t shout. She could hear a distinct clicking sound and knew immediately what it was – a gramophone record had come to the end and was still turning. Quickly she hurried into the living room.

‘Papa?’ she said again.

Her father was slumped with his head on the table. His spectacles had fallen off his nose and hung crookedly from one ear, and gripped in one hand was the photograph of his wife. Isabella hurried to his side and her fingers felt for his pulse, the way she’d seen him do a thousand times to his patients. His skin was warm, not ice cold. She touched his slack unshaven cheek and was greeted with a contented snore. She laughed. It burst from her in a loud rush of relief, as the tension she’d been holding so tight inside suddenly broke free, and she shook her father’s shoulder. He grunted, startled, and fought to open his eyes a slit.

‘Papa!’

Clearly he’d been working at the hospital day and night as he struggled to put bones and body parts back together, but Isabella could not let him sleep now. She needed to thank him. Had to press her cheek to his, had to let him know how grateful she was for the fact that he must have begged Grassi on bended knee to release his daughter.

‘
Grazie
,’ she said simply.

He blinked as he came back to life and pushed himself up on his elbows. His face was creased with exhaustion.

‘Isabella! Where on earth have you been? I’ve been worried. Don’t you know there’s a curfew?’