She lets go of his hand, leans back.
“I’m seeing the PM tomorrow.”
“I thought you’d decided not to.”
She fights back tears. “It can’t be avoided. I have to face up to things. I spoke to the magistrate this afternoon, you know, the one who’s investigating Fede’s death. I told him the truth. He wants to talk to me again, he says, on Saturday. He was nicer than I’d expected. Compared to Giulia, who isn’t?”
“Well, she’s had a rough time. Exiled during the war, jailed,” says Martin. “Tortured, by all accounts.”
“Giulia the martyr,” says Helen.
“I didn’t mean that.” Martin takes his hand away from Helen’s. “Is that how she sees herself, as a martyr?”
“No. She sees herself as a servant of the constitution, as though the thing has been written in blood. Her blood. Which I suppose it has, in a way; I suppose she does have blood.”
“And a martyred son.”
Helen nods. “Yes, Federico’s the martyr now.” Her eye is attracted by someone entering the room, a thickset man with a shaven head, who glances at them both. For a second she thinks he might be a journalist and she wants to leave, she reaches for her bag on the floor with a brief involuntary shudder. Martin turns round to see who’s there but already the man has gone. She shakes her head. It was nothing.
“I’ve been doing a bit of nosing round,” he says.
She wonders how much more she wants to know.
“A friend of mine had a look at Federico’s cell phone records.” He pauses, lifts his shoulders, his bottom lip jutting out. He’s not looking well, she thinks. His flesh is soft and pasty, like dough that children have played with, that has picked up the dirt from their hands. He needs to comb his hair and change his shirt. Out of the agency, away from his desk, he is beginning to look like a lost old man. It breaks her heart to see him reduced to this, his fingers fiddling with the cigarette pack in the pocket of his jacket like a rosary. And she wonders what he’s done to get this information, not only today but in the past.
“What did they show?” she says.
“His secretary, his assistants. His father two or three times a day. His mother rather less often. You, obviously. A priest.”
“A priest?”
Martin wondered how she’d react to this.
“Yes, not your usual PP though.”
“PP?”
“Sorry, my dear. I forget you’ve never belonged to the mother church. Parish priest.”
“I don’t think Federico had a parish priest.”
“Not your parish. Someone in Umbria. Bit of an odd fish by all accounts. His name is Don Giusini. He’s one of these anti-global types. Quite an activist. He got himself into trouble during G8, when they sent the police in to kick shit out of those kids.” He glances across. “I’m surprised you weren’t there.”
“I should have been. I wish I had been.”
“Masochism, my dear.”
“You don’t understand, Martin. I was having a dirty weekend with Giacomo,” she says. “In a convent, of all places.” She sighs.
“Time well spent, I imagine,” he says, giving her a cautious smile.
“It was embarrassing for him,” she says. “When all the trouble blew up he was asked to write a piece about it, his impressions and so on. Except that he didn’t really have any. He could hardly write about what he’d really been doing.”
When her mobile rings, she reaches down for her bag, beneath her chair, pushing aside the printout to retrieve it. She looks at the screen.
“Talk of the devil,” she says.
“Are you alone?” says Giacomo.
“No,” she says, “I’m with Martin Frame. Are you?”
“Yes,” he says. “I’ve been abandoned.”
“Oh dear.”
“I thought perhaps I could come to your place?”
“Yes,” she says. “That would be nice.”
She stands up. “I have to go,” she says to Martin. She looks for her wallet, but he stops her.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he said.
“No,” she says. “No, I’m not.” She smiles. “You can walk me home if you like.” She touches his cheek. “The air will clear your head.”
PART FOUR
1
Rome, Friday, 4 June 2004
Giulia and Helen are sitting together in the back seat of the official car that Giulia appears to have acquired the right to use, a car identical in every way to the one Federico died against, apart from its colour, which is black. Both women are as close to their respective smoked windows as the width of the car seat will allow, silently staring out at streets deserted of everyone but groups of tourists in shorts and sun hats, at the shuttered and barricaded shops of the Corso, at parched yellow grass as the driver takes them slowly round past the Villa Borghese horse track. Sitting beside the driver in the seat that would have been Federico’s, Fausto throws the occasional glance behind him, but Giulia either doesn’t notice this or chooses not to acknowledge him, leaving Helen to smile at him with a gratitude he can’t quite see.
They are going to look at Federico’s body, laid out in what Fausto has translated as the ardent room, a minor reception room inside the ministry. Helen and Giulia, in agreement for once despite Fausto’s doubts, have refused to consider a space with religious connotations.
La camera ardente
. The ardent room. “I
don’t know what it’s called in English, I’m afraid. I’ve never been to one before,” Helen said in an apologetic way, touched despite herself that Fausto should be using English with her, as though she were a child and needed to be made to feel at home among adults. “I expect it’ll be something to do with
morte
. Mortuary. Morgue. Something like that.”
“Mortuary chapel,” Giulia announced, reprovingly. “I remember being privileged to attend Churchill’s lying in state, to pay my final respects, my country’s final respects, to a national hero.” She’d looked through Helen’s wardrobe for something suitable, finally settling on a black dress Helen hasn’t worn since singing in a concert more than ten years before, a linen dress that now hangs loosely on her, giving her an unattractively shrunken, gaunt look that seems, nonetheless, to gratify Giulia, who is also, although more stylishly, dressed in black. She must have an extensive collection of appropriate mourning outfits by now, thinks Helen, neatly cut suits like this one; her colleagues and friends, the old republican guard, have been dropping like flies these past few years. One ardent room after the next. How odd that it should be
ardent
, though; surely there is nothing icier and more indifferent than this trooping past the body of someone dead. Because what she feels most strongly as she sits in the back of the car with her mother-in-law is indifference, not to Federico, not
essentially
, but to this display, this performance, that she has allowed herself to be talked into by Giulia.
Now, as the car cruises past ranks of mourners and comes to a halt inside the ministry courtyard, Helen’s instinct is to tell the driver to drop the others off and take her home. But it isn’t her car, or driver; she doesn’t have the courage, or the right.
The door is opened for her by a middle-aged man whose anxious, troubled face she recognises, who offers her his arm as she leaves the car and says, in a low voice, as if to remind her: “Remondini.” She nods. Of course she knows him, he worked with Federico. She’s seen him at their flat a dozen times, over dinner, staying on behind when she went to bed and lay there in the dark, not sleeping, wondering when Federico would come to bed and whether it was worth staying awake, knowing that he would wake her in any case, whether she cared or not, to tell her what had been said.
She rests her fingers on his forearm and is about to thank him when her mobile rings. She turned it on in the car, to call Giacomo, who left her flat early that morning, but lacked the courage. “Switch that thing off,” hisses Giulia behind her, but Helen, aware that she is being childish, opens her bag, pulls out the mobile and sees that it is Giacomo calling her. With a protective gesture, Remondini steps briskly between her and the group of people at the door to the room where Federico must be waiting. But, of course, Federico isn’t waiting. Dead men don’t wait.
“I can’t talk now,” she says, giving Giacomo just enough time to say that he loves her before she turns off the phone and replaces it in her bag. She looks behind for Fausto, who walks up sharply beside her and takes her hand in his. He leads her past the waiting people, hardly a crowd, no more than a dozen, who murmur and shuffle away from her, their eyes avoiding hers, as Fausto also moves to one side, to allow her to enter first.
They have put him at the centre of the room, on a table draped with some heavy crimson material. He is out of his plastic bag and lying fully dressed in a coffin and she wonders where the suit has come from as she walks across, Fausto one step behind, Giulia talking briefly to a man she doesn’t know beside the door. It is newer than anything he owns, and more expensive. She looks at this man in his satin-lined box who is no more Federico than the table is, or any piece of wood or marble or made-up flesh, the flesh of some slaughtered animal. She looks at their efforts to make him seem alive and human, the black suit Federico would never have dreamed of wearing, that someone must have bought for him, the tie, the polished shoes more pointed at the toe than he would choose, as though he himself were the mourner and not the mourned, his normally wild blond hair brushed back from his forehead and gelled into place, his lips and cheeks just touched with colour but still clown-like. Oh no, she thinks, this final indignity, this absence, at least he isn’t here to see it, because it is clear to her at this moment that there is no Federico left, no trace of him, even less than yesterday, she realises now, or was it the day before? Two days ago in the morgue, with Giacomo beside her and Federico on a metal tray, like half-wrapped meat. She still hasn’t seen his wound. Perhaps that would make it real for her, some visible damage to the flesh and bone of him. She’s read of grief-torn women throwing themselves into coffins to lie beside the corpses of their husbands and wonders what possessed them. There was a moment in the car when she’d imagined herself seeing him move and crying out, “He’s still alive!” Or she’d kiss him and feel his mouth move against her mouth, respond to it. It wasn’t a thought, nor even a hope, so much as a kind of absence of thought or hope, a wiping out of what had happened, like children when they ask for the same story twice because there are no guarantees that, the second time, it won’t have changed.
Only his hands look real, unscathed,
his
. Expecting to be stopped by someone, some other hand – Giulia’s – reaching out to slap her, she reaches in to stroke one and it is cold, so cold she starts back, a cry caught on her lips. Nothing has changed. Fausto is close enough to whisper that they should go, they’ve stayed long enough, and she is once more aware of the others.
“Where’s Massimo?” she says, looking round.
“Massimo?” says Fausto, glancing behind him. A queue has begun to form at a slight distance from the family party, to see Federico.
“Federico’s driver,” she says, her voice rising. “Why isn’t he here with Federico?”
“Take her out of here,” says Giulia, with a tone of contempt.
“They killed him too, didn’t they?” says Helen. She sounds hysterical, the last thing she wants. She has promised herself she will stay calm.
“You’re all right, my dear,” says Fausto.
She wants to pull away and say
I’m not all right
, but something prevents her, a sense of dignity if that weren’t Giulia’s preserve. Perhaps of shame. I would make a scene, she thinks, if I were strong enough.
They are leaving the building, Helen one step in front of her parents-in-law, when a man she doesn’t know comes up to her. Younger than Helen, in his thirties at the most, he places himself squarely in her path before anyone has a chance to stop him. He is wearing a black suit and dove-grey shirt. At his neck, she sees a white dog collar. Through the corner of her eye, she is half aware of Giulia urgently summoning help.
“You don’t know me,” he says. But I do, she thinks, although she doesn’t know his name and has never seen him before in her life. What had Martin said?
“Don–?”
“–Giusini.” He sounds relieved. Two large men in double-breasted suits appear from nowhere and grasp his elbows, but Helen shoos them away, excited by her power as they fall back into the crowd. By now the courtyard is teeming with people.
“Federico spoke of me?”
Helen tosses her head back, a brief and not quite affirmative gesture, but otherwise doesn’t answer.
“I would like to be able to talk to you when I can,” he says. “About your husband. About Federico.” He is the same height as Helen, delicately made, with large brown eyes and a day’s growth of beard, like a model’s. His hair is thick, roughly parted and pushed behind his ears. There is an urgency about him that reminds her of Giacomo, not Giacomo now but the Giacomo who came back from South America, enraged and ecstatic, almost three decades ago. The priest glances round with impatience, as if to say
Who are these people? What do they have to do with us?
then, apologetically it seems, smiles at Helen, his eyes on hers so that nothing will be missed. A smile of complicity.
“I don’t have time,” she says. “Not now.” Giulia is tugging at her sleeve like an impatient child, while Helen does all she can to ignore her. Outside the entrance to the ministry courtyard, held back by a dozen uniformed porters, camera crews wait for them to leave. She sounded colder than she intended, and hurries to make amends. “This afternoon, after lunch. Come to my house. You know where I live?” Before he has a chance to do more than nod, Giulia pulls her away with startling force.
“If you dare do that again, I’ll slap your face,” says Helen. “That won’t look very good on the news this evening, will it?” She nods towards the cameras, the journalists ready with their microphones. “Haven’t you seen them, gathering?” Giulia’s fingers relax enough for Helen to pull her arm from their grasp. She wants to push the old woman away from her with both hands, push her hard in her chest, hurt her in some deep way. Humiliation will do, even better than pain; she’s learnt to tolerate pain, she’s fed on it; she’s fed on grief.