The Drowning River (25 page)

Sandro removed the clothes from the holdall carefully, stacking them on a small table in the thin light of the vast, cold
salotto.
A faint perfume rose from them. He looked at the passport photograph and saw the ghost of a knowing smile. The painting set was brand new; he lifted it out and held it in his hands. A long flat tin of watercolours; Iris March leaned over and took them from him, turning them over reverently in her hands. He looked in the washbag and saw toothpaste, toothbrush, a blister pack of contraceptives marked with the days of the week. He didn’t need to look to see that the last one she’d taken would have been Tuesday, at the latest. Carefully he replaced everything, except the passport and the aeroplane ticket.

‘I’ll take these to Maresciallo Falco,’ he said. ‘To the police,’ and Iris March compressed her pale lips.

‘Can’t you. . .’ She bit her lip.

‘I have to,’ he said, with resignation. ‘They have the authority, to contact the airline, to talk to them about passenger lists.’ She bowed her head. ‘They have the resources.’

‘OK,’ she said, ‘if only they didn’t take so long. They seem to take so long. They don’t tell me anything.’ Sandro hesitated.

She watched him closely while he impersonated the police officer he had once been, on the phone to Alitalia. He asked for the names of no-shows or cancellations on those flights; the operator, initially cooperative, stalled. Patiently he listened as she got up on her high horse, talking about passenger confidentiality.

‘Perhaps you could call me back,’ he suggested politely. He gave her the mobile number and then, as an afterthought, gave her Pietro’s number, at the station. He could tell she was on the point of questioning his authority. ‘You could fax them to him?’ he pleaded; she made a noncommittal sound, typical of petty officials everywhere. He held out no hope, however; the man might have flown separately. Or there might be no man, or he might be some Sicilian who’d be meeting her there. It was a mess.

‘Don’t think so,’ said Iris slowly, when he asked her, any boyfriends from down there, the south, anyone she’d hooked up with. She struggled to remember. ‘Mostly it was American boys,’ she said. ‘None of them was serious.’

‘You need to think,’ he said, taking both her hands without thinking. ‘Let things settle, you know, in your mind, and there will be something. Some clue, something. You have the mind, you have the eye for detail.’ He really believed it, too.

She looked back at him, pale and serious, and nodded. Self-conscious suddenly, he let her hands drop.

Sandro stared at her, willing her to understand, to come up with a single piece of solid proof. There had to be a mystery boyfriend. Otherwise the only suspect was Claudio.

‘She wouldn’t have gone on a trip on her own,’ said Iris March, shaking her head, then, with growing confidence, ‘it’s just not the kind of thing she did; too lazy. I’m sure there was a man.’

He chewed his lip; it had to be faced. ‘You think Veronica was meeting someone called Claudio, though.’

‘Well,’ said Iris, looking bewildered, ‘you don’t think he could be the boyfriend? As far as I understood – if he really exists, well, she’d only just met him. She hardly knew him.’

‘Tell me what you know about him,’ said Sandro carefully.

She nodded reluctantly, then spoke in a low voice. ‘Someone – a friend, our friend, Jackson, he was close to Ronnie, he says he met this guy in a bar and told Ronnie about him, how he was a genius, really – ’ She broke off.

Sandro, who had been nodding in recognition, said, ‘What is it?’

She stared at him. ‘You believe me? You believe – Jackson? You think this guy exists?’

Jackson must be the boy Claudio had been seen talking to, by the tired red-headed barman. Sandro nodded. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said unhappily. ‘He’s real.’

She looked as if a great burden had been lifted. ‘Oh,’ she said, exhaling. Sandro wondered what this Jackson was to her; he was pretty sure the boy didn’t deserve her.

Taking out a photocopy of the photograph of Claudio that Lucia Gentileschi had given him – it had pained him to see the original getting dog-eared – he held it out. But Iris March was shaking her head.

‘It’s not him?’ said Sandro, feeling a great leap in his chest.

‘I never saw him,’ said Iris. ‘You’d have to ask Jackson.’ Sandro sat back, swallowing his disappointment.

‘Where is this guy?’ he asked. ‘This Jackson?’ And saw a flush appear as bright and startling as a rash on the marble neck.

‘I don’t know,’ said Iris. ‘That is, I’m not sure, somewhere in the city, I’ve got his number – here, have his number.’ She fumbled for her phone, and he saw the flush rise as she bowed her head.

‘All right,’ said Sandro, putting out a hand to stop her, ‘it’s not that crucial, I – well, I’m pretty sure it’s the same guy.’ She relaxed, took a closer look at the picture. Her colour subsided.

‘Is he Jewish?’ she said, as if remembering something. ‘He looks Jewish.’

‘Why do you ask?’ said Sandro carefully.

Iris frowned. ‘Jackson said something about the guy he met learning to draw in the camps, in the war. He said the old guy told him the story of his life, pretty much. So he is Jewish?’

‘Was,’ said Sandro.

‘What?’ said Iris March, suddenly paler than he would have thought possible.

‘He’s dead,’ said Sandro. ‘It seems he walked into the Arno, an hour or so after your friend Ronnie was last seen.’

It Turned Out To be a very long walk.

‘A bit of wet won’t kill us,’ Luisa said, watching Giulietta Sarto for a reaction, and quietly pleased to see Giulietta’s likeable, weatherbeaten monkey face grinning back at her as they set off in the lee of the houses of the Via dei Bardi. It wasn’t so bad if you kept close to the wall, and they’d kitted themselves out with waterproof boots, raincoats and a pair of sturdy umbrellas.

She’d be forty this year, not a girl any more. ‘Tough as old boots, me,’ Giulietta said, and her face was alive with interest. ‘So what’s the story again?’

They came past the Palazzo Pitti and the main entrance to the Boboli, where a dismal huddle of elderly women in pac-a-macs milled indecisively at the ticket booth, and set off down the narrow winding length of the Via Romana. The huge park loomed up behind the houses to their left, grey-green through a mist of rain. As they walked, Luisa pieced the story – two stories – together and saw Giulietta struggle to make sense of it. They came past the neglected facade of the natural history museum, a shuttered up greengrocer’s, an antique shop, a restorer, a dumpster still unemptied from the night before, overflowing with pizza cartons. Everything seemed abandoned, dead in the rain.

They stopped across the road from the gate, huddled in the inadequate shelter of a shopfront. Behind them a girl was dressing the window, rigging light fittings up over a bed with a velvet spread and heart-shaped cushions. The new trend towards Sunday opening hadn’t affected Luisa yet; she thanked God Frollini was holding out against it. She gave the girl a smile through the glass.

‘Dunno what Sandro’s take on this is,’ Giulietta reflected with cheerful practicality, ‘but I’d say when girls go missing, it’s about half and half.’

‘Half and half?’ said Luisa curiously, her attention drawn away from the girl and her window display.

‘I mean half the time they’re just murdered, straight off, and dumped.’

Luisa looked at her stony-faced and Giulietta grimaced apologetically. ‘I mean, I’m talking about street girls, here,’ she said. ‘Not your art student types, but it could be the same, couldn’t it? We’re not that different.’ She shrugged. ‘Except if she’s got money.’

‘And the rest of the time?’ Luisa managed. She didn’t want to know. Giulietta took Luisa’s hand and Luisa felt how cool the thin fingers were in the rain, the poor girl’s circulation shot to pieces with diabetes.

‘Maybe you don’t want to know,’ said Giulietta, and Luisa smiled wanly. She went on. ‘But look at that guy, in Germany, was it, kept a girl prisoner for years, didn’t he? Of course, it’s not years, mostly, but weeks.’ She hesitated. ‘They do tend to be nutters, though. The ones that keep ’em alive.’ She made a face.

There had been cases, Luisa knew that. Girls – pretty much always girls – kept in cellars and sheds and outhouses. Somewhere the man could visit, somewhere private. There had been rooms built underground, for the purpose; she remembered a case in the newspaper of a man who’d abducted a couple of young girls and kept them in a soundproofed cellar. Only he’d been arrested for some minor offence, got a couple of months in prison and the girls – the children – had starved to death. Luisa pulled her arms around herself in the rain, because Claudio Gentileschi had a bolthole he kept secret from his wife, and he’d gone to his grave without telling anyone where it was.

‘What I’m saying,’ said Giulietta earnestly, taking her by the elbows, ‘is never say die, though. I think that’s what I’m saying.’

They both laughed the same small grim laugh, and in the window the girl looked up at them. Giulietta gave her a little wave, and they stepped out of the awning and crossed the road. As they approached the gate Luisa registered that the gallery opposite them and to the left of the entrance was called the Galleria Massi.

‘Ha!’ said Luisa, pointing.

‘What?’ said Giuli.

‘Must be something to do with the school,’ said Luisa, ‘the great Massi empire.’ The window was dark; she frowned and turned her head from the gallery to the back gate of the Boboli, practically next door.

‘Sandro says the girl was last seen heading in here,’ she said slowly. Through the little window in the park’s gatehouse a young woman in glasses and several layers of clothing was hunched over a book.

‘Caught on camera,’ said Giulietta drily, and pointed up to a place on the wall where a camera was mounted. Luisa would never have noticed it but, then, she had never had to hide from anyone. She followed the angle of the lens, pointed at the gatehouse and a little beyond, into the Via Romana.

‘It’s a big place,’ said Giulietta. Through the iron gates the gardens looked deserted; a broad gravel path led up between yellowing lime trees. Beyond that stretched darker foliage, holm oaks and cypresses, and through their canopy the roofs of several buildings were visible. The orangery, greenhouses, stores, sheds. Odd bits of building work behind screens of corrugated iron; once you started looking at it, thought Luisa with dismay, the place was one big building site.

They showed their residents’ passes; the girl barely glanced up as they came through before pushing up her glasses and returning to her book.

‘But someone might have seen her,’ said Giulietta robustly, and took Luisa’s arm. ‘We can ask, what’ve we got to lose?’

But there was no one to ask.

Arm in arm under their umbrellas they doggedly traversed the alleys and avenues in the rain, down past the shuttered orangery, its
knot garden looking ragged, around the fountain where the orange trees had been removed for winter, and then under the huge semi-circle of plane trees, up the wide cypress avenue, all deserted. They zigzagged back up again slowly, up behind the jumble of mismatched rear facades looking down into cramped courtyards, the storerooms of shops, up until they were level with shuttered bedrooms, then roof terraces.

They reached the rose garden and saw that even the porcelain museum, once some Medici princess’s summer house and the favourite of old ladies on rainy Sundays, was shuttered up for restoration. Luisa stared out across the olive groves to San Miniato, the little church she loved more than any of the others. As she stared she became aware that the downpour was easing up, but still no one appeared.

They came down from the rose garden, on the point of giving up when they passed a low plastered building with a terracotta roof where a light was on. Giulietta peered inside, through the half-glazed door. An elderly man in overalls was sitting at a table under a bare light bulb, staring at the wall. They knocked and after staring at them for a long minute he got to his feet and came to the door holding a cup between his hands.

Hesitantly Luisa produced the battered newspaper cutting and showed him the picture while Giulietta turned her back and stared down the avenue. She obviously thought this was daft. The old man frowned and shook his head for what seemed like a good ten minutes. Then he said, ‘No. But the Carabinieri already asked all about her. Crawling all over the place.’ He grimaced. ‘Tuesday there was a bit of sun, I was busy cutting the bay, clearing up the mess people make. I never saw her.’ He sighed again. ‘And I’ve had enough, the bloody Carabinieri asking blooming questions every five minutes.’ He flung an arm out. ‘Look at the place. You can creep from one end to the other without being seen, if that’s what you want. People get up to all sorts, and don’t get caught.’

Luisa nodded; he was right, of course. As a child she’d played endless games of hide and seek herself in the Boboli, in the dusty shade of the old hedges. If you knew the place, and were determined, you could stay concealed for hours. She looked past him, past the potting
shed that was his domain. Right there, for example, she could see a hole in the hedge and darkness beyond; a shortcut or a secret passage for children.

‘Clearing up mess?’ She spoke lightly; it was half an attempt at sounding sympathetic, half curiosity. ‘Was there any particular mess that day?’

The old gardener grunted. ‘I’d say.’ He fell silent and Luisa thought that might be all she’d get, but steadying himself against the doorjamb he took a step across his threshold. She wondered how he managed to do the job, as he seemed almost as dilapidated as his shed, but once he was in motion he improved. He strode across the gravel path and pointed down the slope towards an empty pedestal, about waist height, just opposite the avenue down to the Annalena gate and with a thick hedge half surrounding it.

‘Lovely terracotta urn,’ he said. ‘Some idiot knocked it off, smashed it to pieces. Three hundred years old, had survived all those frosts. Stupid foreign kids, jumping out of the hedge and not looking where they were going.’

‘Did you see them? What time was this?’