The Drowning River (11 page)

‘How much?’ said Sandro.

‘He came twice,’ said Eva. Her eyes shifted to look over his shoulder.

Someone was behind him, a tall man with stringy hair and a beard waiting with his
tessera
held out for inspection. Sandro left.

Outside on the
lungarno
the traffic roared and screeched; Sandro crossed the road to enter the dingy grey park that ran along the river for a bit of space to think. There was a mist of fine rain in the air; more rain. He walked through the park, around the empty children’s playground, to the parapet along the river, where he stopped. He leaned on the stone, looked up at the great hills of the Casentino for a glimpse of something other than grey and far off he saw it, a little cap of snow above the cloud.

All right,
he thought, so he didn’t go swimming every day at nine o’clock. Ten years ago or so, he took out membership, maybe intending to distract himself, do something useful, but he changed his mind.

According to the barman on the Via dei Pilastri, he didn’t even come this way, and Sandro felt strangely reassured by this turn of events. He had hated the Bellariva and, besides, this wasn’t the part of town he’d have put a man like Claudio Gentileschi, the modern apartment blocks, the smoked-glass penthouses along the river rooftops, the grey park, the traffic. He looked the other way, towards the city; he couldn’t see the Duomo from here, but he could see the arches of the Ponte Vecchio, the cupola of Santo Spirito, the Cestello. That way, out of sight at the far end of the city and the far side of the river, was the Lungarno Santa Rosa, where Claudio Gentileschi had drowned three days earlier, the only other fixed point in his missing day.

If he didn’t go swimming every day at nine o’clock, where did he go? What had happened, ten years ago, so that he needed to tell this lie, and where had he been going every morning since?

Giving in to his aching knees after the discovery that the eighty-one-year-old Claudio Gentileschi had not, after all, spent every morning swimming for the sake of his health, Sandro took the bus. He crossed
the river to the Piazza Ferrucci and the stop, which he knew because it was outside the best
rosticceria
in the city, of the little electric bus that would take him meandering all the way to the Lungarno Santa Rosa.

Odd, thought Iris as she let herself in, how the place felt completely different. Twenty-four hours, and everything had changed. It even smelt different; she tried to catch Ronnie’s scent in some superstitious attempt to summon her up, but it was almost gone, overlaid by the smell of musty curtains, old wood and – what was it? Dead leaves, a smell come in from outside. She must have left a window open. She stood in the hall, feeling the draught; dropped her bag to the floor in the half-dark.

‘Hello?’ she said, feeling stupid even as she said it. ‘Anybody there?’

The Jaunty Orange Bus hummed and whined along the Lungarno Serristori, jolting through potholes, the rain off the river whipping at the windows. November rain, thought Sandro gloomily as he stared through the bleared glass, a whole five months of winter; something squeezed in his chest at the thought of the future. What will they say, he found himself thinking, caught somehow off balance, what will they say at the hospital? He closed his eyes briefly as too much detail flooded his mind – the consulting room, the bed, the monitors and drips and anxious faces. The doctor in green scrubs talking seriously as he and Luisa sat and listened.

The bus stopped by the bridge where the jewellers’ windows were bright in the grey morning, a couple with umbrellas looking in. An elderly woman got on with difficulty, hauling a shopping trolley after her. Sandro got up to help her in, showed her to his seat. The buses were so tiny they were full after one stop; the woman shuffled past him and sat down, muttering something to herself. Another crazy one.

Luisa’s mother had had breast cancer, but she had been old. Did that make any difference? And in addition it had not actually killed her, he remembered the doctor saying that to Luisa; it had been a sizeable tumour that she had never said anything about to anyone, as
far as they could determine, but it had not spread. She must have been able to see it, the doctor had said gravely after her death from heart failure, kidney failure, everything failure, when had it been, ten years ago? Luisa’s mother had been eighty-three, which had been a good age for a lonely old woman who had struggled to live on for fifteen years after her husband without really wanting to. But there are two of us, he wanted to say; we aren’t lonely. What had Lucia Gentileschi said? It ends with us.

The bus turned away from the river, into the maze of the Oltrarno’s streets that remained obstinately foreign to Sandro, the damp alleys with their smell of overflowing drains, the workshops, the dusty bars. It buzzed across the front of the Palazzo Pitti, which stood bleak and grey in the rain, the big sloping forecourt empty of tourists. It turned down the Via Mazzetta and across the Piazza Santo Spirito where the junkies huddled on the stone bench around the base of the Biblioteca Machiavelli. It juddered to a halt at the end of a ramshackle line of traffic, a rubbish truck, a delivery van, the
furgoni
from the market reversing out with their loads of cheap clothes and trestle tables.

The pavement was so narrow and the bus was canted so steeply into a pothole, he could have leaned out of the window to touch them, the junkies. They were pressed back, grubby hooded sweatshirts up against the rain, to get some shelter from the big eaves overhead. Grey-skinned, shivering, like rats forced up from underground; Sandro was glad he didn’t have to deal with them any more. The one on the end looked like Giulietta Sarto had looked, before she cleaned up. So thin you could see every bone in her face, and the eyes yellow with alcohol and sunken. Ahead the lights changed, the traffic shifted; he thought maybe he’d ask Giulietta if she fancied a bit of lunch when this was done.

Sandro thought of Luisa’s mother not telling anyone about the tumour, because she didn’t want to be alone any more. She’d wanted to die. He thought of Lucia Gentileschi; would that happen to her? Was hiring him a delaying tactic, some kind of denial? Maybe it was, but he had the strong feeling Lucia Gentileschi would not be good at telling herself lies. And clearly there was an investigation to be carried out: Claudio Gentileschi’s life had not been what it seemed.

The bus skirted the front of Santa Maria del Carmine, right into the Viale Ariosto and along the old wall. He got out at the Porta San Frediano and within two minutes could feel the drenching rain soaking his shoulders. Against his better instincts he bought an umbrella from a Nigerian in a baseball cap at the traffic lights, wondering as he handed over his five euros what kind of trade the poor guy thought he’d find out this way, miles from the centre. Soaked through, too, with the thin jacket he was wearing. But he was cursing the Nigerian soon enough, as the umbrella’s spokes buckled before he’d even got it up.

The wind blew straight down from the river; walking towards it, Sandro could make out nothing but grey, the rain slanting horizontally towards him so he could hardly see across the bridge. There was another of those hoardings, commemorating the flood: this one showed the Uffizi’s long courtyard, drowned and empty and silent. November, 1966. There was more rain forecast for the next five days. Sandro peered over gingerly, looking down at the water, yellow with mud and swirling.

The parapet along the river here was waist height, and Sandro walked along slowly, looking along towards the Lungarno Santa Rosa, looking down. On the far side the church of the Ognissanti shone white in the rain among the big hotels with their shutters closed, low season, and a little further on, the black, leafless trees of the Cascine. The police station was out there; it wouldn’t have taken them long to get down here and pull Claudio Gentileschi out of the water.

They’d found him in the evening, and he’d been in the water a couple of hours. A fisherman setting up at dusk had seen his back, half-submerged. Sandro could picture it as Lucia Gentileschi told him, sounded almost wistful, like a seal, she said, his big back in the waterweed, rolling over in the dusk.

Sandro wondered why he hadn’t been seen earlier. It had been a bright day on Tuesday, people might have been out walking in the afternoon sunlight. He thought back to Tuesday morning, when he’d been standing idly in his office – office! That was a joke. Looking out of the window, at girls. Claudio Gentileschi had been somewhere between there and here, somewhere between the Via dei Pilastri – the
synagogue, the shop with its dusty menorah in the window and notice offering a Sabbath meal to Jewish visitors – and the quiet, anonymous streets of the Oltrarno.

There had been stones in his shoes, Lucia Gentileschi had said, and she had produced a handful of gravel from a little lacquer box;
I asked for it,
she’d added with a puzzled look on her face as if she didn’t know why she’d asked, or indeed why her request had been granted. Just a handful; there’d been more. What had that idiot Scappatoio been thinking of, giving it to her? But Sandro realized that he might not have been able to say no either.

White gravel, in a black lacquer box like a holy relic or a talisman. Not enough to keep a body down, though. Neither here nor there.

Sandro walked along the parapet, looking for a way down. He came to the old wall; this was where they drew the line in the property freesheets, ‘San Frediano, Fuori Muro’ – inside or outside the wall. Outside was beyond the pale. Nestling under the mediaeval stone were the remnants of a church, a glassed-in shrine and part of an arch; jammed up next to it were the pergola and Portakabins of the Circolo Rondinella, a social club. A tattered, handwritten poster on a wire fence advertised a ballroom dancing evening.

Pausing, Sandro looked through the link fence at the garden – more a yard than a garden – dripping plastic tables, the bare wire of the pergola; not enough room to swing a cat. He tried to imagine the couples turning slowly in here, the women in high-heeled dancing shoes. There was a meal and a drink included in the price, twelve euros; he caught himself wondering if Luisa would be up for it, and almost laughed. In the Portakabins behind the yard something moved, and then moved away.

Sandro stepped back, looked up at the wall; Claudio Gentileschi had been found the other side; the Lungarno Santa Rosa was
Fuori Muro.
Wrong side of the tracks. He walked away from the little social club and the shrine with its plastic flowers, feeling an odd kind of reluctance. His old partner Pietro said – and he had never given it much credence before – that San Frediano was the real deal, the survival of everything that was ancient and original in the city, never mind that it contained
no palazzi, a bare handful of notable churches. So what if it had the Circolo Rondinella?

On the other side of the wall was a fenced stretch of sickly grass and stunted trees, then a children’s playground. Gingerly – because there was always something suspect about a grown man entering a playground on his own, but it was the only way he could see of approaching the river – he came through the gate. Was this where Claudio Gentileschi had come?

It seemed monstrously unlikely; indeed it was laughable that Sandro had thought twice about coming in here himself. The whole place was surely so disgusting that no children would be tempted by it. The grass was scabby, no more than occasionally tufted mud, and it was marked by regular mounds of dogshit in various stages of decomposition; the slide was emblazoned with garish graffiti, the swings were broken. The weird rubber asphalt that surrounded each piece of play equipment was crumbling and eroded like an ancient carpet. Sandro crossed to the parapet; you couldn’t get down here, either, in theory; the low wall was surmounted by another stretch of chain-link fence. He walked along it, eyes flicking to the ground so as not to tread in anything, then down to the river. Maybe it was not so surprising after all that no one saw Gentileschi until later; who would come walking here? Even on a sunny winter afternoon.

Behind him, back towards the wall where all he had seen had been the fenced-in trees, a ramshackle assortment of huts and sheds and sawn-off bits of old rusting containers clung to the slope, against gravity. They might have belonged to the social club; huts used by the fishermen to store their tackle, in theory, though God knew what else, maybe weedkiller and demijohns of cheap wine and tools and junk. It was pricey to own or rent a
fondo
– a garage or cellar – in Florence, so the city was full of these little accretions, like antheaps, testaments to man’s inability to get rid of his rubbish.

Sandro looked back, down river to the traffic over the Ponte alla Vittoria, ceaselessly moving in the rain. The panorama took in the black trees of the Cascine and the distant misted flatlands out towards the Viadotto dell’Indiano. The city’s hidden hinterland, a place of drainage
ditches and shanty towns where illegals scavenged along the riverbanks and
contadini
scratched a living from a handful of olive trees and sheep that grazed between the airport runway and the
superstrada.
Not a pretty view.

At the far side of the playground there was a small square of dark red asphalt with four benches and a good-sized holm oak. As he approached, Sandro saw three men sitting on the bench under the tree; although it was still in leaf, it did not seem to be providing them with much shelter. The youngest of the men – under thirty, anyway – was reading a comic book, holding the pages up close to his face, the drawstring around his hood pulled tight. He kept breaking off to look at his watch, as though someone was waiting for him somewhere. The other two had the darkened skin of rough sleepers, and through the thin plastic of a bag on the ground between them Sandro could see three one-litre cartons of red wine.

You would come here to kill yourself, if it was out of shame, thought Sandro with dread; if you thought you deserved less than nothing.

With reluctance Sandro approached the men. He began to speak, standing in front of them. He asked if they came here every day, if they had been here, for example, on Tuesday. If they knew this man. They gazed up at him with faces completely blank, though whether from drink or idiocy or something more like alienation, he could not have said. He held out the photograph of Claudio Gentileschi and the two drunks turned away quickly, mumbling insensibly, as if he were a mendicant himself, a beggar holding out one of those handwritten cards telling them he had no work and children to support.