The Drowning River (42 page)

Which was Anna Massi, who had not vanished into thin air in one sense, but in another, and was gone, beyond hope of return.

In The End, Serena Hutton flew in from Dubai on the Wednesday. Iris had sat in Sandro Cellini’s warm kitchen at close to two in the morning on Sunday, listening to him make the call, drinking camomile tea and thinking of Ronnie in her hospital bed. She had been airlifted across the city to Careggi by helicopter with Sandro and his wife, but Sandro had found the time to call Iris first to tell her.
She’s alive, just. I have found your Veronica, and she is alive.

Ronnie had lain pale and quiet next to a Roma girl with stomach pains and a drip and a half dozen members of her extended family hovering anxiously, batting away appeals from the nurses for some of them, at least, to go home. Ronnie had had only Iris.

Approaching the bed, Iris had been frightened; there were things she didn’t want to think about. Massi, and his wife, stuffing cloth into Ronnie’s mouth and bundling her into a dark place, quarrelling over what was to be done with her. Five days in the rain and the cold and the dark, with the smell of chemicals and paintstripper and the dirty river.

At first it had seemed that Ronnie was still unconscious; her eyes were closed, and her hands very straight at her sides with the palms turned upwards. Even like that, Iris felt herself unclench at the sight; it
was still Ronnie. On her cheek, which was smudged and grubby, her eyelashes still curled, ridiculously long, and suddenly there was a new picture in Iris’s head, Ronnie at the mirror, leaning in to put on mascara. ‘Ronnie?’ she whispered. Nothing. She tried again. ‘Ronnie?’

Ronnie’s mouth moved; her tongue came out and she licked dry lips. Then she seemed to struggle and Iris felt herself panic, looked around for a nurse. She wanted to run. The spasm stopped, and Ronnie opened her eyes, tried to raise herself up, and failed. Iris put an arm around her shoulder and put the straw in her water glass to Ronnie’s mouth until Ronnie put up a hand to say, that’s enough, and Iris took the glass away, busying herself. Ronnie’s gaze settled on Iris, and she let out a small sigh, and relaxed back against her piled pillows.

‘’Syou,’ she said, eventually, and lifted her hand, gesturing; it took a minute for Iris to understand what she wanted. She took Ronnie’s hand. ‘Iris.’

‘It’s OK, Ronnie,’ said Iris, not knowing what else to say.

‘I shouldn’ – shouldn’t. . .’ Her lip trembled and she controlled it. ‘I was so stupid, Iris,’ she said, searching Iris’s face.

‘Only a bit,’ said Iris, holding her hand tighter. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

Ronnie sighed, like a small, tired child, and let her eyes fall shut. Then suddenly they were open again, wide with alarm. ‘God,’ she said, struggling back up to prop herself on her elbows, tangling herself in the drip. ‘Mum’s not here, is she?’

Iris felt herself smile, hugely. ‘Ronnie,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’

And by the time Serena Hutton did arrive, wrestling with a pile of designer luggage, red-haired with her sharp little face, complaining about the cold, the inefficiency of the airport, the uselessness of Italian hospitals, it mostly was all right. She walked in, and Iris walked out.

‘It’ll be OK,’ Ronnie had said, when Iris had gone in to the hospital to warn her, and she’d sighed. ‘I’m used to her, you know.’ Weariness, Iris realized, was not something she’d heard in Ronnie’s voice before, or acceptance, and almost never gratitude. She was different but, then, everything was. The world turned.

Jackson left the same day, a flight to Rome and then all the way across Europe, across the Atlantic, back to the New World. He had an
errand to run first; Iris said she’d come as far as the house, for moral support. Lucia Gentileschi’s house.

It had been Sandro Cellini’s idea. He had summoned the two of them to his office, on the Tuesday.

The city had been in a strange mood; the skies had still been low and grey and the river still yellow but the waters had dropped, dramatically. All sorts of debris had been cast up on the mud-plastered embankments – shattered boards and bicycle wheels and dirty plastic bags – and traders had talked in hushed voices on their shop doorsteps about how bad it might have been. Sandbags were still stacked against the Uffizi’s river facade.

‘Both of us?’ said Iris, on the phone.

‘Si,
Iris,’ he’d said with weary patience.
‘Tutte le due’.
He spoke to her in a mix of Italian and English now; it didn’t seem quite real that they’d only known each other a week. She could hear tiredness in his voice; she knew there was something going on at home, with his wife. She wasn’t well. ‘I want you to come with him,’ said Sandro. ‘Because when he’s with you, I think he is more of a man. Not so much a boy.’

It had taken her aback; Sandro had seen them together no more than twice, had spoken to Jackson alone once. But she was beginning to understand that he was an observant man.

‘You have spoken to your mother yet, Iris?’ he said, straight away when they arrived, fixing her in the eye. The three of them were standing in his small office, in San Frediano; Iris would have liked to be back in that kitchen of his but he’d said, quickly, no. Not home. Perhaps his wife was in bed.

‘Not yet,’ she said, with a hint of defiance. Would he understand, if she tried to explain how it was between her and Ma? That they had to be careful; there was just the two of them, and Iris had to be independent, for both of them. Perhaps he already understood; it wouldn’t surprise her. She relented. ‘I need to be sure of what I’m going to do next,’ she said quickly to Sandro. ‘That’s all.’

He’d left it at that; beside her, Jackson had been listening, but he didn’t say anything.

‘Jackson,’ said Sandro, with stern kindness. ‘Now.’

Sandro had given Jackson a padded envelope containing six old sketchbooks, and the address of Claudio Gentileschi’s widow, and told him to go and talk to her. ‘He spoke to you,’ Sandro had said roughly, clapping Jackson on the shoulder. ‘You liked him. That will mean something to her.’

When he arrived with his bags in the Piazza d’Azeglio, ready to go, Jackson had stood square in front of her, folded his arms across his chest and said bluntly, ‘Come with me. Please. You’d like the States.’

She’d shaken her head, smiling, because now she knew. What was going to happen next. ‘I like it here,’ she said.

It was a cold, bright morning, and Iris waited with Jackson’s bags on the pavement in the Via dei Pilastri, in a thin slice of sun that fell on her between the eaves of two huge stone buildings, like a blessing. When he was gone she’d call Ma and tell her. Tell her she loved her, and that Antonella Scarpa had found her a place on another course and she was staying here.

Under the great trees in the Piazza d’Azeglio, unknown to either of the two young people, Sandro watched Jackson and Iris emerge from the huge, ugly house of the Contessa Badigliani. He couldn’t have said what he was doing here, only Luisa was at the shop and he couldn’t seem to sit still at the moment. There was no way, she had said, that she wanted to mope around at home, no matter what the doctor said about taking it easy.

So he stood and watched as the two figures rounded the corner of the square, side by side but with no point of contact between their bodies, and disappeared down towards the Via dei Pilastri. Then he set off after them, unseen.

This is what private detectives do, he thought, mocking himself, but the sense of unreality with which he had embarked on his new career had gone. He had completed a job; was that it? He was too old and too disillusioned to expect anything like professional satisfaction, whatever Pietro had implied.

‘We’d have you back in a shot, you know,’ he had said on the phone only this morning; typical of Pietro to give him space, to leave things to settle.

‘You wouldn’t,’ Sandro had said, smiling to himself. ‘And I wouldn’t go. I like things better this way.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Pietro, relieved. ‘How’s Luisa?’

Which had been a harder question to answer.

Maresciallo Falco had not given Sandro space. The carabiniere had phoned personally, Monday afternoon, and asked, politely, if Sandro would have the time to pay him a visit, to update him on the case. After the morning he’d had, not to mention the thirty-six hours without sleep, he should have said no, but blearily he’d kissed Luisa, who had been filling the washing machine and refusing to talk, said he’d be back in an hour, and walked down there, across the roaring Arno, to the Boboli. His senses had seemed sharpened by the lack of rest; he looked at everything he passed – the yellowing trees, the dirty pavements, the overflowing dumpsters – as if he was seeing them for the first – or last – time.

‘You look rough,’ had been the first thing Falco had said as Sandro entered his office. The carabiniere was sitting back in his chair with a sheepish look the cheerful insult attempted to disguise. He’d then gestured to the chair opposite him and Sandro had sat warily, not knowing what to expect. There was a degree of discomfiture on either side; Falco had underestimated Sandro, and knew as much, and in his turn Sandro found that he didn’t relish this unfamiliar position on the moral high ground. If Falco ended up feeling humiliated, there’d be trouble.

But then the Maresciallo had begun to speak. Haltingly at first, but quite soon with something verging on enthusiasm, at least for a carabiniere, Falco had gone through the case with him, and it had slowly dawned on Sandro that the man actually admired him for what he’d done. He’d shifted in his chair; listening to praise had always made him uneasy, even in the force, but when Falco finished abruptly by standing, stiffly, with his hand out, Sandro had taken it.

Of course, Sandro had been there to hand over what he knew about Veronica Hutton’s disappearance to the investigative body concerned,
and he obliged. He told Falco about the Scuola Massi’s forgery racket, but when it came to Claudio Gentileschi’s part in it, Sandro hesitated. Was it their business, after all, Claudio’s death being under the jurisdiction of the Polizia Statale, rather than the Carabiniere? He felt the tug of old loyalties, to his force, as well as to poor dead Claudio, unable to defend himself, unable to explain. Sandro’s first duty was to protect his client, Lucia Gentileschi, but, then again, there were new alliances to consider. There was his new career.

Eventually he had taken a deep breath, and explained his position to Falco, who obliged him with a pair of palms face up: it was understood; it would go no further. Sandro could see that the quiet bargain struck left him in the weaker position once more, but curiously enough he was happier that way. And Lucia was safe. Antonella Scarpa wouldn’t implicate Claudio; she’d said as much, although otherwise she was co-operating fully with both the Guardia della Finanza and Carabiniere investigations. He hoped she’d escape prison, although he imagined there wasn’t much Antonella Scarpa couldn’t handle in life.

It hadn’t been perfect, he’d got it wrong time and again, yet when it mattered, he’d got it right. By the skin of his teeth, but sometimes that was all you needed, and the job was done. And although Sandro hoped that next time it might be just a matter of following someone’s cheating husband, he knew that next time, he’d do better.

As Iris waited on the sunny pavement for the boy to come back out, her broad lovely face was tilted up, eyes closed, to catch the sun. Sandro realized with joy that he didn’t have to worry about Iris March.

He watched the boy come out, saw them call a cab, saw her help him in with the bags and lean down to kiss him goodbye on the cheek, saw her wave at the departing taxi. Saw her pull her coat around herself, and walk off towards the river with her mobile pressed to her ear. And only then did Sandro walk across the road and ring at Lucia Gentileschi’s door.

In The Small, Clean, featureless room, Sandro held Luisa’s free hand as she lay on her side with the narrow plastic tube that was taped to what they called a port on her pale forearm. They were lucky, he told himself. This was what lucky was.

Of course, when the serious-faced surgeon had first spoken the words in the little consulting room, that other side of Sandro had thought only that this diagnosis was the deal. He had thought of the drained, white look on Luisa’s face after they had loaded Veronica Hutton into the ambulance. A life for a life, he’d thought, before his rational side tore the thought to pieces in disgust. A life for a life.

The first lucky thing was, it had not spread. The exhaustive body scans and blood tests had definitively shown that it had not spread to any other location in the body. Not the lymph, not the lungs, nowhere else. And it was a – the surgeon had said what kind of cancer it was, it had a name, but Sandro didn’t want to name it. It was the opposite of aggressive, that was what mattered, and it was tiny.

‘You were brave,’ said the surgeon to Luisa. ‘You examined the breast, that’s brave to begin with, and when you found it, you came immediately.’

Of course, Sandro had thought impatiently as he gripped Luisa’s hand, don’t you know her?

There had been no need for a full mastectomy, but Luisa had demanded one. The chemotherapy was a precaution, but Luisa had insisted on it. Brave.

On the bed, she turned her head towards him, and smiled.

Lucky.

I would like to thank Angus MacKinnon, without whose steadfast intelligence and belief in Sandro Cellini this book would not have been written, and my agent, Victoria Hobbs, for her clear-eyed and constant support.