The Villa Triste (10 page)
‘Signorina Caterina.’ Night air danced on Dieter’s words.
I waited.
He raised his hand from his pocket and handed me a pack of cigarettes.
‘Please,’ he said in German, ‘I want to give you these. Please take them for your poor boys, with my compliments.’
A moment later, when we drove under the barrier, he saluted.
I closed my eyes. I could feel myself floating, as if I had risen out of my body. When I opened my mouth, I gulped air into my lungs as if I had never breathed before.
Isabella was waiting for us. She guided us towards the dark of an old machine shed at the back of the monastery. Just before the driver doused the lights, I caught sight of two figures standing on either side of the doors. Massimo’s face was lit for a moment, then he and the person who stood with him, who looked no bigger than a child, swung the wide doors shut behind us. A beam of torchlight guided us forward. I caught a glimpse of Carlo, as he banged on the hood telling us to stop. The driver killed the engine, someone lit a lantern, and a moment later we were all standing on the packed earth floor of the empty shed.
‘Quick,’ Massimo said, moving towards the rear door of the ambulance. ‘We’re all right here, but you can’t be too long before going back through the checkpoint. It’s best if you’re gone before Mass finishes’ – he glanced at Issa – ‘in case anyone else uses the footpath.’
As I stood back while the driver and Massimo helped the men out of the back of the ambulance, I saw that the child who had helped to swing the door closed was not a child, but a short, slight young man. A teenager with a misshapen back, a slope to his shoulder that suggested the possibility of a deformity, a hunchback, or broken bones from a childhood accident that had never been set properly.
‘Little Lamb!’ Massimo saw me staring and ruffled the boy’s hair with the kind of aggressive affection men use with dogs and children. ‘Little Lamb is my mascot!’ he said. Issa and Carlo exchanged a glance as Massimo let out one of his booming laughs.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Issa muttered. ‘Shut up.’
If Massimo heard her, he ignored her.
Issa disappeared into the back of the shed and appeared again with three piles of clothes. Carlo produced boots, a pair of which I recognized as Rico’s. As he began handing out socks I noticed that, like Issa, he was wearing mountain clothes – woollen trousers, hiking boots, a heavy jacket. He would be going with her. He murmured something to her. She glanced up at him. Then he lifted a rucksack, and she turned around so he could place the straps over her shoulders.
Concerned as I was by then with getting the bandages off the men, getting them dressed and moving as fast as possible, I was not so concerned that I did not take in the look on Issa’s face, or the way Carlo rested his hand on her shoulder. A pang of loss shot through me. My hands actually faltered. My wedding day was next week.
I didn’t think anyone had noticed – certainly not Issa and Carlo, or the men themselves. Then I realized that Massimo was watching me. That he had seen me look away and blink back tears.
He and the boy vanished a moment later. After slapping the driver on the back, Massimo clapped the boy on the shoulder, knocking him so hard he almost stumbled, then they slipped out of the shed doors and into the night. I could hear Massimo whistling as they walked away down the road towards the front of the monastery and the village.
Issa tightened the straps on her rucksack. She glanced at Carlo who was adjusting his own straps, then looked at the three men. They nodded, the last one pulling on a pair of Rico’s old gloves.
A few moments later, as I stood outside the shed and watched them move slowly up the trail, I thought I had never felt more lonely. It was not just mistrust and anger, the pain of destruction and loss and death the war had brought, I thought then. It was loneliness. That was the true horror. The reality that, when it came to it, we were not a battalion. Or a band of comrades. On the contrary. We were each of us alone, fighting the fight we were given.
They were almost lost in the tall shadows of the trees when Issa broke away. It took me a moment to realize that she was running back down the path towards me. As she came close, I saw that her face was glowing. Her eyes were wide and sparkling in the chilly night air.
‘Cati!’ she said. ‘I almost forgot! Here.’
She dug into the pocket of her jacket and pressed something into my hand. She wasn’t wearing gloves and her fingers were cold.
‘It’s your wedding present, in case I’m not here.’
I looked at the familiar oval of her face, at the blue of her eyes, and the lion’s mane of her hair. Then I put my arms around her, and pulled her close. I drank in the smell and the warmth of her, unable to imagine a time or a world when she would not be here.
Finally, I had to let her go. She turned and ran back up the path, growing smaller and smaller until she merged into the shadows.
I stood a moment longer. Then, when I could no longer make out any shapes, or hear even the shuffle of leaves in the chestnut forest, I looked down. There was still just enough light to make out what it was that she had pressed into my hand. A small book, with a pencil slotted neatly into its spine. The cover was red, and embossed with the lily of Florence.
I was still standing there, fingering the buttery, expensive leather, tracing the golden outline of the lily, when I felt the strange bony fingers on my shoulder.
‘We should go.’
The driver’s voice was soft. In the half-dark, his eyes appeared wide and colourless. I looked back and saw that the shed doors had been pulled open. I hadn’t even heard the noise.
I nodded, but before I moved, I put out my hand. Issa had told me that among themselves, they used code names, things like Little Lamb, presumably. But I had no code name to offer.
‘Caterina,’ I said.
The driver looked at me. For a moment, I thought he was not going to repay the compliment, not going to accept even this small gesture of trust. Then he almost smiled. He placed his hand in mine.
‘
Il Corvo
,’ he replied. The Crow.
I nodded. Now I was one of them.
The rain began right on time. It came down suddenly on the first afternoon of the month, in long hard sheets that blew through the city. Within minutes windows swam, walls wept, and the gutters churned themselves into small angry torrents. A Uffizi brochure swirled by. Botticelli’s
Venus
smiled dreamily up from the foaming water, then spiralled down and was caught in the grate of a drain.
Standing in the doorway of the building where she had lived for thirty years, Marta Buonifaccio watched the street empty. People scurried, she thought, like rats, heads bent and furtive. A tall man carrying a briefcase swore and darted towards the bus stop where already two blue-jeaned teenagers stood huddled. With their cropped heads and pierced skin, they looked to Marta not like shining examples of youth, or even overgrown children bent on menace, but like penitents, cast-out creatures who shuffled with bent heads and bent shoulders, shrugging themselves into clothes too thin and too large. Far from filling her with fear, she wanted occasionally to give one of them a coat. Then she reminded herself that their parents were probably bankers, university professors, lawyers who made more in a year than she had managed in a lifetime.
An old woman stood in the opposite doorway, shrouded in black, her coat collar turned up against the wind. An umbrella, useless in this, was clutched in one gloved hand. The other hung onto the requisite black bag. Bought for too much money twenty years ago, it would hold house keys, a packet of tissues, a half-used lipstick of unassuming pink smelling of something sweet, and a too-large wallet, its plastic envelopes filled with fading pictures of grown and indifferent children. For a moment, their eyes met. The woman smiled and glanced to the heavens. November rain, Marta could almost hear her saying. Doesn’t it always come as a shock? The beginning of one more winter.
The bus swished between the buildings. The woman hobbled towards it, the cavernous black bag swinging from her crooked arm like a pendulum. I wonder if that is how I look now? Marta thought. Old and blended in, another worn feature of this worn city that no one notices much, and no one will miss. How, she wondered, does that happen? In what year is it, exactly, that we begin to vanish, to fade into our surroundings as if they are absorbing us, pulling our bones back home? The teenagers slithered onto the bus. The man with the briefcase reached for the old woman’s arm, rain plastering his bowed head as he helped her across the gutter. Then the doors closed with a hiss and swallowed them all, and the street was empty again. Marta stood for a minute more, watching nothing, before she turned back into the building.
It was lunchtime. The faint odour of mushrooms and cooking oil hung in the air, mingling uncomfortably with the sharper tang of furniture polish. Marta could not remember when, exactly, it was that she had taken it upon herself to start polishing the palazzo’s stairway and the sills of its huge heavy windows. Probably at about the same time that she had begun to fade. Twenty years ago, at sixty? Twenty-five years ago, at fifty-five? Whenever it was that her hips had begun to thicken and men had ceased to look at her face. She’d turned then to the building, and it had not let her down. The windows, tall and diamond-leaded, looked out onto the side alley. Through them, you could see the iron rings in the walls of the next palazzo that had once held torches.
Marta had read somewhere that torches had been necessary, in the Middle Ages when the alley was still used, to light it – even in the daytime. Without the benefit of flames it was so narrow, and the palazzos on either side of it so tall, that even in broad daylight it was like walking into a tunnel. The windows back then were really for show. In those days, glass was prestige. Openings in solid walls meant you could afford firewood to heat the house.
Someone had left a pile of Chinese menus and flyers for the local taxi service on the floor beside the mailboxes. Tutting, Marta gathered them up. Moo shoo pork. Kung Pau chicken. She knew what that meant. Cats were protected by law in Florence, but no one ever did a head count.
Marta was about to drop the flyers into the waste-paper basket she had recently placed beside the long hall table when she noticed the envelope at the bottom. Distinctly creamy, it looked expensive. And unopened. She reached down and plucked it out. The envelope was thick, and rather heavy. The top corner was lifting, but the seal still held. There was a crest on the back flap, a tiny rearing dragon in a circle. She turned it over. The front was addressed in spidery writing to Signor Giovanni Trantemento. The stamp, Marta saw when she reached out and switched on the lamp she had also supplied, looked distinctly British. She sighed. Signor Trantemento was, technically, only a few years her senior, but the difference was, he was old.
At first, after Rome, after he had got that medal, he had walked with a bit of a spring in his step. Or, Marta thought, at least a bounce in his shuffle. But over the months that had seeped away, as if he were a toy whose battery was winding down. His face had narrowed perceptibly. From behind his round glasses, Signor Tran-temento, who had once been considered if not handsome, at least suave, now looked bug-eyed and constantly alarmed. It had crossed her mind that he was sick, or had received bad news. But she knew that was not it. It was simply that he was getting ready to die. Feeling the chill of the shadows that stretched towards him.
Sighing, she turned off the lamp, then began to climb the stairs. It did not occur to her that Signor Trantemento and his mail were not her business. Everything that went on in this building was her business. She was as much part of it as the huge chestnut doors, and the brass knocker with the lion’s head she polished every Thursday.
Giovanni Trantemento’s apartment was on the fourth, and top, floor. The palazzo, as far as Marta knew, had not been built for anyone particularly important, or by any name that had been remembered. No Pazzis, or Strozzis, and certainly no bankers’ balls of the Medici. She had often wondered who had ordered up these walls, who had swung open the door and climbed this staircase for the first time. Whoever it was would not appreciate being forgotten. Five centuries ago when this house was built, it would have been impressive. A monument that would last forever. Hah. Marta knew better than that. She was on the one-hundred-and-fiftieth step. She could have taken the tiny box of an elevator, but that would not keep her fit, keep what muscles she had in working order.
The windows up here let in a little more light than those on the ground floor. Rain pinged and batted against them, turning the air grey and cold. Signor Trantemento’s apartment certainly had the best view in the building, and even a loggia, but it could not be described as welcoming. It was more like the eyrie of an ageing and increasingly mangy eagle. On the landing between the third and final floors, Marta switched on the light, an inadequate frosted sconce.
As she neared the summit, the top of Signor Trantemento’s door with its carved pediment of grey stone fruit reared into view. Now she could see the door itself, with the knocker she did not polish. Signor Trantemento had hung a tapestry on the landing wall. A lion held a banner while a unicorn, his front feet in a woman’s lap, smiled foolishly. Rabbits, foxes, and what looked like a lumpen weasel crouched amid embroidered flowers. In the rainy light, the tapestry’s red background quivered. It seemed to have slipped off the bottom of the material and seeped onto the stone floor. Marta had reached step one hundred and seventy-eight before she realized that what she was looking at was blood.
Alessandro Pallioti had a new office and a new title. Both were products of the Polizia di Stato’s most recent spate of streamlinings and general overhaulings. Like changes in the weather, these paroxysms of modernization happened from time to time. In Pallioti’s experience their effects varied. Sometimes they were simply embarrassing, like elderly ladies taking up disco dancing. Sometimes they actually achieved something, though not necessarily what had been intended. Usually they were a combination of the two – an awkward, slow inching towards Bethlehem.
His job was a case in point. Like Yeats’ rough beast, it lumbered on, essentially unchanged. No matter what title you gave it, he thought, it was still a specialization in all that was worst in human nature. Greed, cruelty, violence, carelessness and their all-singing, all-dancing handmaidens – murder, theft, corruption, and any and all other general or specialized mayhem man- or womankind was able to think up.
He swivelled in his chair, as if he were stirring up the sourness inside. Shaking the cocktail of petulance and discontent that seemed to have brewed in him over the last six months. Frowning, he tapped his pen against the leather edge of his blotter, unsure if he was disgusted with himself for indulging in feeling this way, or feeling this way because he was disgusted with himself.
The bottom line was, either was unacceptable. But then again, since his fiftieth birthday he had found pretty much everything unacceptable, from the state of the world, to his job, to his own attitude. When he had complained to her about his current insufferableness, his sister had smiled and gently pointed out that he was having a mid-life crisis.
She was probably right. Despite being a full fourteen years his junior, Seraphina was almost invariably right. She had advised him, with her usual equanimity, that it would pass – and had politely suggested that he should refrain from buying a sports car or marrying his secretary in the meantime.
Pallioti had been able to reassure her on those two counts, at least. His new secretary – who had come with his new office, along with the black leather sofa and a fashionably inscrutable coffee table – was
A
, bald, and
B
, male. Neither of which was to his taste. As for the sports car, the enhanced salary and pension he had received along with the new title were generous, but did not run to the Lam-borghini of his dreams. And being a perfectionist, he would settle for nothing less.
He spun his chair back again and looked out of the half-moon of his window down onto the Piazza. Rain swept across the wide empty space, blurring the buildings on the far side and the tall elegant arches of the loggia that fronted them. A throng of tourists sheltering from the downpour looked tiny and miserable. They had all read too much about the Tuscan Sun and were prone to forgetting that this was a city where winter was not only possible, but inevitable.
Glancing at his watch, he stood up and straightened his tie, which was dark blue and dotted with small gold lions who looked as if they were saluting. The Florentine Marzocco. They reappeared engraved on the oval face of his gold cufflinks. He had worn them today because he was due, in approximately half an hour, at a lunch that was being hosted by the city in honour of the members of an EU delegation who were supposedly fascinated by new and innovative methods of policing. He was dreading it. And in his present mood, rather enjoying dreading it. At least it gave him a target for his ire.
He shrugged into his suit jacket, and was pulling his cuffs down, making certain that they were exactly even, when the phone buzzed.
The secretary whom he had no intention of marrying, a blue-eyed young man called Guillermo whose head was as bare and shiny as a polished stone, said, ‘Dottore, I have the Mayor.’
Pallioti rolled his eyes. He had known the Mayor for the better part of twenty-five years and, despite the upcoming lunch, considered him a friend. But he was an old-style new-style communist, a worrier and a fretter with all the instincts of an overwrought sheepdog. Doubtless there was something he wanted Pallioti to say – or more likely, be certain not to say – that must immediately be transferred from his teeming brain, and could under no circumstances wait the thirty minutes it would take to reach the private dining room at the Helvetia and Bristol.
‘
Pronto
,’ Pallioti murmured.
There was a dull emptiness on the line. This was not surprising. The Mayor had been known to place calls then leave people hanging on for half an hour while he chased eight or ten other topics and phone conversations. Pallioti looked out of the window again. The three flags in front of the building, the circle of gold stars on its blue background, the green, white, and red bars – Hope, Faith and Charity – and the pennant of Florence, rose and fell in the gusty wind.
‘
Pronto!
’ the Mayor said suddenly out of nowhere. ‘
Pronto!
’ He sounded like the counter boy at an especially busy pizza parlour.
‘You called me, Dottore,’ Pallioti reminded him.
‘Oh.’
There was a momentary pause. Then the Mayor said, ‘There’s something I need you to do for me.’
Pallioti was tempted to point out that he was about to do something, something he loathed – standing up and spouting meaningless platitudes about policing – when he realized that that was the problem. Or at least part of it. He had worked his whole life to attain the marginally exalted position he now held, and having got it, he hated it, because he spent so much of his time talking about policing. Or writing reports about policing. Neither of which had anything to do with why he had joined the Polizia in the first place. He was, he thought, looking at the rain, like a ship that struggles through storms to reach port, then sinks out of boredom once she’s moored.