The Italian Wife (39 page)

‘Tell me, signore,’ she pushed him harder, ‘did you ever talk with Luigi about what you were both doing? About the savagery of it? The immorality of it?’

Andretti laughed, a quick flash of unpleasant sound that turned Isabella’s stomach.

‘Of course we didn’t talk about it.’

‘Why not?’

Abruptly he leaned as far forward as his belly would allow. ‘Because, Signora Berotti, your husband loved what he was doing. His eyes would light up when he swung that truncheon and he never wanted it to stop. It made him come alive.’ He blinked slowly, remembering. ‘To hurt someone.’

Isabella remembered the blows. When the grappa got the better of him. The bolt of pain. The degradation. The kisses and apologies and promises the next morning. She remembered only too well, but never had she let a word of it pass her lips. She finished her coffee, a shot of something to drown the memory.

‘What is it that Luigi did?’ she asked.

He stared at her. So lost. She could see it in his eyes. She stretched out her fingers and laid them on his hand where it lay on the table, soft and fleshy and impotent. She couldn’t imagine it wielding a truncheon, breaking bones or cracking skulls.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry for you. And for Italy. And for all those people that my husband terrorised.’ A tear slipped down her cheek and she brushed it away angrily on the bandage, but it didn’t brush away the ache that scorched a path down her flesh. ‘I’m so sorry.’

Andretti spread his bulky arms in a futile gesture of despair. ‘It is too late to be sorry.’

‘So please help me. It’s not too late for that. Tell me what Luigi did to get himself killed. Something that you and the other Blackshirts didn’t do. It can’t hurt him now, but it will help me. And maybe it will help you too.’

‘It wasn’t his fault,’ he insisted suddenly. ‘Don’t think badly of him. He didn’t mean to…’ He hesitated.

‘To what?’

Andretti gripped her hand. ‘One night we had a purge on known Communists. A large unit of us marched from house to house, knocking on doors, dragging people out into the street so that others could see what would happen to anyone who stood against the Fascisti.’

He tried to light another cigarette but his hand was shaking so badly that Isabella had to hold his lighter steady for him, and whatever horrors he had taken part in in the past, she couldn’t find it in her heart to hate a man so wracked with guilt for the wrongs he’d committed. But atonement was beyond her power to grant him. She waited until he had smoked half the cigarette and then asked again.

‘What did Luigi do that no one else did?’

‘Signora, you are a lovely lady. You are free of him. Don’t ask for more.’

‘I am
not
free of him. I can’t forget…’

She stopped. Their eyes held each other and gently this man who was trying to hide himself inside his layers of fat breathed out a soft sugary breath.

‘Very well.’ A sad smile tugged at his full lips. ‘I tell you because you were his wife and you, of all people, deserve to know, but I warn you that you are your own worst enemy.’

‘I very much doubt that, Signor Andretti.’

He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Luigi was all fired up after our purge of the Communists. He was like a rat catcher who couldn’t get enough rats to satisfy his thirst for their blood, eyes wild with it. So when one of the poor bastards screamed that he would betray a whole nest of the Communists if Luigi would leave him alone, your husband listened.’

There was sweat on Andretti’s brow, though the café was not hot, and he wiped his palms jerkily on his knees, at the same time signalling for a waiter.

‘Two cognacs,
per favore
,’ he barked.

‘
Si
, signore.’

Neither spoke. They sat in silence until the glasses were placed in front of them, the amber liquid gleaming under the lights. Andretti drank his straight down and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand with a grunt of satisfaction.

‘Go on,’ Isabella murmured.

‘There
was
a nest of them. Of Communist scum gathered in a meeting house to escape our purge. Your Luigi went over there and set fire to it. Most of them fled under cover of the smoke, but two were burned to death.’

Isabella picked up her drink, swallowed a slug of cognac and felt it hit her stomach with a punch that deadened the sickness that threatened to erupt.

‘That’s not all,’ he told her.

She let her breath out in a thin fragile thread. ‘What happened?’

‘Afterwards. When the building was nothing but ash and stone, that was when we learned that upstairs in the attic were hiding twelve wives and four children.’

A cry tore from Isabella. Heads turned but she didn’t see them. ‘Did they live?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Did none survive? Not one?’

‘None.’

She seized her cognac and drank it down. To burn away the screams she could hear in her head.

‘But he was never charged, was he?’

‘No. It was called an accident. A fallen candle. Communists proving to be their own destroyers. No one can trust a Communist, that’s what we said to each other.’

‘But it was Luigi.’

‘Yes.’

She lowered her head in her hand so that he would not see her face and her shoulders trembled violently.

He put a hand on her bowed head and kindly stroked her hair. ‘From that moment on, the men who escaped the smoke that night formed a tight group that became fanatical about the need to destroy Mussolini’s regime. They fought violence with violence and their leader became a man to be feared. He stood out because of his blond hair and so should have been easy to capture. But he wasn’t. He was quick and cunning and melted through our fingers. Like trying to catch a ghost. He eluded us every time.’

Isabella lifted her head from her hand. ‘What was his name?’

For a second the words could not push past Andretti’s lips but finally they trickled on to the table between them.

‘Carlo Olivera.’

36

She looked ill. When Isabella walked out of the Caffè Greco into the Rome morning sunlight, it was as if she had a fever. Her wide blue eyes were too bright. Her skin was flushed except for the patch around her mouth where it was a dull leaden grey that reminded Roberto of the colour of the sea when readying itself for a storm.

He felt a pulse of anger. At the man inside the café who had done this to her. And at the husband, the brash black-shirted husband who had dragged her into this nightmare that she was fighting so hard to break out of.

Immediately Roberto went to her side. Her hand had fallen from the makeshift sling, so he gently retied it and drew her other arm through his. As they walked, she told him the information that Giorgio Andretti had given her and it was hard, appallingly hard, not to heap his rage and disgust on Luigi Berotti’s name. But he was her husband. And he was dead. He had paid the final price for his sins. Evil attracts evil to itself as surely as the moon draws the tide each day, and it was stalking the streets of Italy every day as long as Mussolini held power in his fist.

On the train Roberto sat Isabella beside a window, giving her room to breathe. To think. To find in her head the man she thought her husband to be and to fit him into the skin of this murdering bastard whose blood pumped faster when he was brutalising others. Roberto could see the rise and fall of her chest, as laboured as if she were running.

Her thigh pressed along the length of his where they sat side by side in the smoky carriage. Her body needing him, needing the comfort that her mind refused to ask for. During the hour of the journey she stared with unfocused eyes at the beauty of Italy’s green fields and shimmering poplars speeding past and yet for Roberto it was impossible not to imagine Luigi Berotti’s hands claiming ownership of her slender body, his lips leaving the imprint of his kisses on every part of her creamy skin.

Ten years ago. He reminded himself with a rough shake that it was ten years ago and she had been only seventeen when she married him.

Don’t judge her, Roberto. Don’t judge her. Any harsher than you judge yourself.

He turned to her and kissed her hair. He breathed her deep inside him as if by doing so he could inhale the pain, removing all trace of it from her, and in its place leave the solidity, the certainty, the calmness she craved.

Her hand sought his, sliding her fingers between his, and together they waited for Bellina to come closer.

Dark blue uniforms. A red stripe down the side of the trousers. A white bandolier across the chest. The carabinieri were out in force. The sight of the dark wall of them standing to attention on the Bellina railway station platform alarmed Roberto, but he turned his back on them, helped Isabella off the train and set off towards the exit gate with no sign of agitation. His aim was to get her out of here as fast as possible.

‘Signor Roberto Falco?’

Colonnello Sepe stood before him. The thin face and brilliantined hair looked deceptively ordinary and innocent in the warm autumn sunshine. Except for the gun on his hip. That didn’t look innocent.

‘Yes?’

‘You are under arrest, Signor Falco.’

Beside him Isabella uttered a cry.

‘On what charge?’ Roberto demanded.

‘On the charge of sexually maltreating a child.’

‘What! Don’t be absurd.’

Isabella stepped in front of him, placing herself between him and Sepe. ‘There’s been a mistake,’ she said firmly.

‘Roberto Falco,’ Sepe continued, ‘do you deny that you kissed one of the girls at the convent? Gisella Sevona, to be exact.’

‘Of course he didn’t,’ Isabella responded. ‘This is a lie that someone is —’ But she glanced over her shoulder at Roberto’s face and the words died on her lips. ‘Roberto,’ she whispered. ‘No.’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Roberto said stiffly. ‘It was nothing more than —’

‘You did kiss this Gisella?’

‘Yes. But it was as a friend, nothing more. I kissed her forehead.’

Colonnello Sepe gave a signal to the wall of uniforms which immediately surrounded them. ‘You had only just met the child,’ he pointed out with disgust. ‘So don’t call her your
friend
, Falco.’

The handcuffs closed over his wrists. Isabella was wrenched away from him. The black doors of the arrest vehicle slammed shut.

The girl stood immobile. Trembling.

Her cheeks were flaming. Her eyes clung to the floor of terracotta tiles in one of the interrogation rooms at the police station. On each side she was flanked by Mother Domenica and Sister Agatha, but her head seemed too heavy for her because it hung down low.

‘Gisella, repeat what you told me,’ Mother Domenica commanded, her white neck stretched taut as a swan.

‘He kissed me,’ the girl muttered to her feet.

‘Say it again.’

‘Signor Falco kissed me.’

‘By force?’

‘Yes.’

‘Gisella,’ Roberto stated flatly, ‘that’s not true.’

‘Silence, photographer,’ Mother Superior hissed. ‘Silence. What you did was an abomination.’ Her colourless eyes flared with righteousness. ‘Our Lord Jesus tells us, “
Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
” You hear those words, photographer? Drowned in the sea. Even that is too good for your damned soul.’

The woman was a distraction. She wasn’t the one with the key to the handcuffs or with the prison cell waiting to slam shut on him. He switched his attention to Colonnello Sepe and felt his heart clench tight. The policeman had him condemned and convicted already. The dark eyes were bored. They wanted the girl to fall into hysterics, to crumple to the floor, to sob out her accusation and demand that her violator be hanged.

Instead she hunched in silent misery before him.

‘Look at me, Gisella,’ Roberto said quietly, and her furtive gaze sneaked up at him out of the corner of her eye. ‘Tell the truth to them. You know and I know what really happened. I only kissed your forehead because you begged me.’ His glance flicked around the sterile room and over the uniforms of the policemen and the nuns. ‘But I know you’re frightened. It’s all right, I understand, I’m not angry with you. But please tell them the truth.’

The girl in grey spoke to her shoes. ‘I did tell the truth.’

‘Condemned out of his own mouth,’ Mother Domenica stated with satisfaction. ‘He admits he kissed her.’ She waved an arm at him like a great bat’s wing, and as it whispered through the air he saw a gleam of triumph leap into her eyes. ‘He will pay for his sins.’

‘And you will pay for yours, Mother Domenica,’ Roberto said angrily. ‘You are the one who has forced that child into this situation, but who is forcing you? Who is behind your venom?’

‘I am appointed by God to protect these innocent children.’ She raised the metal crucifix that hung on a chain around her neck and thrust it towards him in a dramatic gesture. ‘Be gone, the devil is within you.’

‘We are each our own devil and make this world our hell,’ Roberto said harshly. ‘Even you.’

‘Enough! Colonnello Sepe, remove this man. You’ve heard enough from his own lips.’

The policeman regarded her with dislike. ‘I do not require you to tell me my job, Mother Domenica.’ He nodded at the two carabinieri standing to attention by the door and they stepped forward to seize Roberto’s elbow. He turned on Sepe.

‘Tell Grassi this will not work. He may have something on that nun over there, but he has nothing on me. This is dangerous. Dangerous to him.’ His words filled the small silent room, banging on the walls. ‘Tell him that from me.’

‘Take the prisoner to the cells.’

37

Isabella ran into the street with the green door, her lopsided gait jarring at this speed but her mind was oblivious to all else.

You are under arrest, Signor Falco
.

Colonnello Sepe’s voice. His words. The sour tone of voice. The pleasure he took in his work. They all reverberated through her mind. And Roberto’s It wasn
’
t like that. Of course it wasn’t like
that
. Whatever reason he had for kissing the convent girl’s forehead, it was an innocent one, Isabella had no doubt. It was being twisted into something abominable, but by whom?