The Traitor (The Carnivia Trilogy) (33 page)

She looked at the clock: it was past midnight. He’d phoned earlier to say he’d be working late. “It’s going well,” he’d said. “I’ve developed some compelling leads. This goes right to the heart of power, Kat. There are some very important people who had good reason to make sure Tignelli didn’t succeed.”

“Rome?” she said softly. Ever since she’d found the ravaged body, half-eaten by eels, in the
peschiera
, she’d been asking herself the investigator’s most fundamental question:
cui bono?
Who stood to benefit most from Tignelli’s death? And the answer, surely, was to be found in the point that Vivaldo Moretti had made to her, over lunch at La Colomba. If Tignelli had succeeded in removing the wealth of the Veneto from Italy’s coffers, Italy would have been bankrupt. She doubted any government minister or official would have given a direct order on such a matter, but Tignelli’s assassination had all the hallmarks of a convulsion by Italy’s
stato profundo
– the “deep state”, the shadowy and ever-shifting alliance of politicians, security services, industrialists and white-collar criminals for whom influence and corruption were simply two sides of the same coin. With a single bullet, Italy had been saved – which was perhaps the greatest irony of all; the whole corrupt mess had been saved from its would-be cleanser, who was, in any case, no better and no worse than the rest.

“Not exactly. I can’t talk on the phone. I’ll tell you all about it when we meet,” he’d promised.

“I’ll have the food on the table at ten past twelve, and not a minute later.”

He’d laughed. “Then I’d better not be late, had I?”

Usually,
baccalà
was served on grilled polenta or even bread, but tonight she was doing it the Istrian way, with some ribbons of pasta, a few chopped anchovies and a handful of breadcrumbs. It was the dish her
nonna
had made every Christmas Eve, when they were supposedly fasting before the big day.

She opened a bottle of cold Tocai and tasted the
baccalà
one last time. It was, she thought with satisfaction, perfect. Her phone buzzed. Glancing at the screen, she saw he’d sent a message.

With you in two. xxx

Humming, she filled a saucepan with water for the pasta, then crossed to the window. Flavio’s car was just drawing up in the street. She watched him get out, and her heart skipped a beat. He bent down to speak to the bodyguard, then slapped the car roof, telling the man to drive on.

He looks energised, not tired
,
she thought.
It’s been a good day
. But the thought was barely forming in her mind when a flash lit up the street. She couldn’t tell at first where it had come from – lightning? A camera? – but even as she was wondering, the sound reached her – a low pressure-punch, like water crashing up a borehole, that forced in her cheeks and squeezed her solar plexus, followed by a brilliant pulse of petrol-orange flame that erupted upwards from the car’s buckling roof like some savage, monstrous jellyfish. She was dimly aware of metal shrieking and spinning through the air. All around her, windows collapsed, liquid as waterfalls: the pane she was looking through shattered as a fragment of tarmac whistled past her head, burying itself in the wall behind. Cars piled up in the street, higgledy-piggledy – she thought for a moment it must have been a traffic accident, a collision of some kind, but as the ring of thick black smoke cleared, she saw the vehicles had simply been hurled out of their parked rows by the force of the explosion. Where Flavio had been standing – where the car had been, the bodyguard, everything:
my love, my whole life
– there was now only a crater. Debris still rained down, thumping and bouncing on the roofs of cars and buildings; and after that, in the ringing silence of her deafened ears, there was just some rather beautiful grey ash, fluttering down on the whole scene like cherry blossom blown off a tree by a strong wind.

A
ND
THEN
,
IN
the aftermath, everything was chaos. The street filled with people, rushing from their beds to help. There were at least a dozen wounded, from the ground-floor apartments mostly, cut by flying glass as they’d slept. Car alarms shrieked, and then sirens: Carabinieri and Polizia, fire engines and ambulances.

She had no recollection of running down the stairs. She found herself walking the street in a daze, back and forth, trying to locate his body, or what was left of it, anything. She fixed on that one, urgent task as if her whole life depended on it.
I have to hold him
. She found a man’s Corvaro shoe, its sole slightly worn, blown off by the explosion. And then, a few minutes later, she saw his leg, crooked, under a parked car, the foot bare. She bent down to haul him out, expecting the weight of a body. But the leg came easily, attached to nothing, and she sat down in surprise.

She was still holding the leg, nursing it against herself like a baby, when the ambulance people came and gently tried to prise it from her.

“No!” she said, or tried to say. “Help the wounded first.” Nothing came out of her mouth. But perhaps it was her ears that weren’t working, not her voice, because she saw the paramedic mouthing that he
was
attending to the wounded: her.

She let him wipe blood from a gash below her ear she hadn’t even been aware of and fix a temporary dressing. She closed her eyes. A great, numbing weariness washed over her.

He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead.

Grief hit her like a hammer blow, the enormity of it sweeping away the last remnants of adrenalin. When they returned ten minutes later to take her to hospital, she was still holding the leg, rocking back and forth over it, as if she would send it to sleep. She continued to hold it like that all the way to the emergency room, where she finally passed out.

They came sometime in the night to take a statement.
Carabinieri
, two of them, a colonel and a female
sottotenente.
She didn’t know them, but they clearly knew who she was; knew, too, that Flavio Li Fonti had been her lover.

Were you expecting him, they asked gently but firmly. Had he visited you at your apartment before. How often. How long. They wanted dates and times, but the grief and shock had knocked her powers of recollection out of her.

Afterwards, she slept. When she woke, she thanked the nurse for giving her something to help. The man shook his head. “I didn’t. That’s just nature taking its course.”

Her limbs and brain felt like glue.

By midday they told her she could go. But not back to her apartment, which was still sealed off. Of course: the explosives team would be searching it for fragments. She hoped someone had turned off the water for the pasta. The saucepan would have long boiled dry by now.

At the thought of the meal she would never now eat with him – at the thought of the hundreds, thousands of meals that would now go uncooked and unshared – she lifted her face to the ceiling and howled like a dog.

The nurses let her cry, and when she was done, gently asked if she had anyone to be with.

She didn’t.

There’s someone waiting for you, they told her. A Carabinieri officer. He didn’t want to come in before, with the others.

It was Aldo. She wrapped her arms around his big solid chest and howled out more tears, until as quickly as it had come, all her energy was gone and she collapsed again.

“You can come with me, if you like,” he said gently.

She shook her head. “No.” She felt obscurely that it wasn’t right. “Thank you. But I need to be alone.”

H
OLLY
DROVE
D
ANIELE
to the Institute of Christina Mirabilis. The nun at Reception directed them to a day ward, where Daniele was given a surgical robe and had a cannula inserted into the back of his hand. Only then did Father Uriel appear, his expression sombre.

“As you know, I have serious doubts about this procedure. However, I’ve consulted with my ethics committee and they have decided that when a patient is threatening self-harm, then it is reasonable to provide it, so long as he fully understands the risks involved.”

Holly gave Daniele a puzzled look. He hadn’t mentioned anything about self-harm to her. But he only nodded calmly.

What those risks were, Father Uriel was now explaining. “You may have sore muscles from the seizure. You may suffer a dislocation of the jaw or shoulders. You may remain disorientated or confused for up to a week. More specifically, it is highly likely that you will suffer from some degree of amnesia. This could last for a few hours or a few days. In extreme cases, it could be months.” He paused. “There may be more significant side effects as well. First, the seizure might become permanent – what we call status epilepticus. If this happens, your risk of mortality is around twenty per cent. Secondly, it may affect your brain in some other, more unpredictable way. A small number of those receiving ECT develop cognitive problems—”

“Wait a minute,” Holly said, alarmed. “By ‘cognitive problems’, you mean brain damage?”

“He’s trying to scare us,” Daniele said calmly. “Don’t worry. I’ve researched the risks.” He reached for Father Uriel’s consent form.

“And you’re quite certain you want to do this?” Holly said.

“Whatever happened to me in that room, I need it to end.” He looked at her and attempted a smile. “There’s a part of me that’s still locked up, Holly. I want to be free.”

They wheeled him away after that. Even though he’d told her it wasn’t like the movies any more, she couldn’t help picturing Daniele as if in an electric chair, a rubber bit between his teeth, his body jerking and spasming as the current sent his brain into overload.

To take her mind off it, she went outside and switched her phone on. There were two messages from Aldo Piola. She frowned: she hadn’t spoken to Kat’s former lover for many months, since he’d led the team that rescued her from the caves at Longare.

Please call me. It’s urgent.

She dialled his number. “Aldo? What is it?”

“You haven’t heard?”

“What?” Fear twisted her guts. “Is Kat all right?”

“She’s OK – she’s taken a blow to the head, but it’s only superficial. But Flavio’s dead. He was blown up outside her apartment. Kat saw the whole thing.”

“Oh, my God… Where is she now?”

“I don’t know. She needs to be with someone.”

“I’ll find her,” she promised. Ringing off, she went back inside. “Is he in the recovery room yet?” she asked the nurse.

The nun shook her head. “Not yet.”

She was torn. Daniele would be expecting her to be there when he woke up. But Daniele had nurses and doctors to look after him, while Kat was walking the streets of Venice in turmoil, alone.

“Can you give him a message for me when he wakes up?”

Kat went back to her desk at Campo San Zaccaria. She saw the startled looks her colleagues gave her, but she ignored them.

Sottotenente Panicucci came over. “Capitano… Are you sure you should be here?”

“Where else should I be?” she snapped. “I want a full update. On everything.” She looked at her emails. To her surprise, there were only a handful: only a single night had passed since she’d last checked them. Such a short interval of time, yet it seemed forever.
When I last checked my emails,
she thought,
he was alive.

Suddenly it seemed impossible, quite impossible, that he was dead.

“Fuck it!” she shouted out loud. “Fuck it! Fuck all of it!”

Some concussed part of her brain was trying to make her continue her life as normal, but the simple truth was that she had no normal now. Nothing was ever going to be the same.

“You’re right,” she said to Panicucci, defeated. “I shouldn’t be here.”

Holly found her sitting on a bench on the
riva
, staring out at the lagoon. A hundred yards away, a giant cruise ship slid slowly towards the terminal at Tronchetto, towering over its pilot boats, its upper decks sparkling with camera flashes. Kat looked at it with unseeing eyes.

“I was going to marry him,” she whispered as Holly sat down.

“I know.” Holly reached for her hand. For a long time they sat there without speaking, in a place beyond the reach of words.

I
N
THE
PERIOD
that followed, Holly divided her time between her two friends, trying to look after them as best she could. Daniele, dazed and withdrawn after his ECT, and Kat, who flipped between lethargy and mania as she struggled to process her lover’s death.

Disappointingly, Daniele had recalled nothing further from his kidnap. In fact, he seemed to have forgotten why he’d undergone the treatment in the first place, or any of the conversations the two of them had had in the days preceding it.

And if he remembered sleeping with her that night, or the long, whispered conversation that had followed, he showed no sign of that either.

An inquest was opened into Flavio’s death and immediately adjourned. His wife flew back from London, where she’d been living with their children. In a newspaper interview she spoke of moving back to Italy permanently. Kat felt no desire to meet her.

She was summoned to a meeting with the other prosecutor, Benito Marcello. He started by saying that he was sorry for her loss. Then he asked her to sign a written version of the statement she’d given to the investigators in the hours after the bombing.

She took it and read it. The statement, and the accompanying report, made it clear that Avvocato Li Fonti had visited her apartment more often, and more regularly, than security protocols permitted. One of his bodyguards had apparently remonstrated with the other, only days before the explosion, saying that they should report the situation to their superiors. He was the one who had died alongside Flavio.

According to the report, the explosion had been traced to a plastic recycling bin in her street, where traces of C4 explosive had been found. A row of those bins had made a kind of lay-by among the parked cars: a natural place to pull up when dropping someone off.