The Drowning River

by Christobel Kent

  She heard sounds elsewhere in the flat and Iris’s mind raced. She’d have to make that list. The name of the bar owner. She needed to talk to Jackson. To Sophia. To the police. Would she have to talk to the American boy who’d called her fat? And she needed to talk to Ronnie’s mum, before she left for the airport, before she got on the plane that would bring her here, hysterical, furious, terrified. Unable to deal with any of it, Iris threw off the duvet, and headed for the kitchen.

  Walking into the bright room, Iris realized she was wearing something of Hiroko’s, a long grey cotton nightdress. It felt warm; the flat was warm; the table was laid with small white cups, a board with slices of dense brown bread, a Japanese teapot. It was so perfectly welcoming and ordered that Iris wanted to cry suddenly. She sat down.

  ‘You sleep OK?’ said Hiroko, appearing behind her in the doorway with wet hair. She made a gesture inviting Iris to eat, twisted her hair up in a white towel and sat down. ‘The bed is hard,’ she said apologetically.

  ‘No,’ said Iris, ‘I slept amazingly.’ And she realized it was true, like a log. No dreams, just a heavy blissful dark sleep, like crawling into a soundproofed cave. Maybe it was because they were at the back of the building, on the ground floor. She remembered Hiroko showing her a small courtyard garden through a long window when they arrived.

  They ate for a while in silence. The bread was quite hard, tasting of bitter grains Iris couldn’t identify, and the tea was yellow, with small flowers floating in it.

  ‘Is this tea Japanese?’ she asked. At home Iris drank her milky Indian tea by the bucketful, but she surprised herself by liking this; it was light and fragrant and somehow purifying.

  ‘Chinese,’ said Hiroko, smiling. ‘Sorry. I can’t find Japanese here.’

  Iris took another sip, and with the unfamiliar taste in the warm, quiet, bright room, she felt something shift in her head, a pressure easing, just enough.

  ‘What did the police say yesterday?’ said Hiroko. ‘What can they do? To find her?’

  Propping her elbows on the table, both hands warmed around the cup, Iris said, ‘They were going to check the hospitals, emergency admissions over this week.’ She spoke normally, but she didn’t feel normal. It was surreal. ‘But they didn’t call, did they? To say they’d found her?’

  Hiroko moved her head slightly. ‘No one called,’ she said.

  Iris nodded, feeling the tension build again.

  ‘Then they’ll try to trace the phone. If it’s still got power, you can do that, they said. You can find out where it was before it lost power, too.’ Had Ronnie even taken her charger? She’d been planning on being away a couple of days, hadn’t she? Or she wouldn’t have cooked up the trip to the countryside.

  She kept the implications at bay. Don’t think about that, she told herself, don’t think about whether Ronnie still has the phone but can’t answer it or recharge it. The thief – if there was a thief – took the phone; the phone won’t lead us to Ronnie. ‘And then they can check her bank account, to see if she took money out.’

  ‘Before the bag – before she lost the bag?’

  Of course, thought Iris, staring at Hiroko’s smooth, clever face, saw her thinking it through. The cards were all still in the bag, so they wouldn’t lead anyone to Ronnie either. ‘But it might give them a clue,’ she said. ‘To her movements.’

  Hiroko nodded.

  ‘And then there’s CCTV,’ Iris went on. ‘Cameras, in the streets.’

  Hiroko nodded again, a little sadly. ‘Not so many in Florence,’ she said. And then, delicately as though this was the question she thought might be the awful one, ‘And – where did they find the bag?’

  And only then did Iris think about it, think properly. At the time she had only been relieved when they’d said, because it had allowed her to stop thinking about rabbit holes and burials.

  ‘They found it in the Boboli,’ she said. ‘In the Boboli gardens.’

  And on the only visit she’d paid to the big park that covered a hillside behind the Pitti Palace – a Sunday walk with Ronnie when the sun had come out and Ronnie’s hangover had ebbed at the same time – Iris had seen that that soft grey-white dirt was everywhere. The dusty gravel paths left it on your shoes; it coated the hem of your coat, your skirt, your trousers. It had sifted down into Ronnie’s bag, like sand in a swimming bag after a day at the beach.

  ‘What are you thinking, Iris?’ said Hiroko quietly.

  And before she could find a way of stuffing it right down to the bottom of her bag of options and out of sight, Iris said, ‘I think something bad’s happened to her.’

  Luisa had made him get up in the end. Forty years of married life and he had always been the one to fetch her a glass of water in the morning when she was always parched and, besides, it was the secret of good skin.

  Sandro lay under the quilt, unable to face it.

  At eight she sat down on his feet, hard.

  ‘I’ve got to get going in half an hour,’ she said. ‘We’re dressing the windows today.’

  He stayed where he was, immobile, face in the pillow.

  ‘This was what I was worried about,’ she said. ‘Not the lump. Not the biopsy. Not the doctor. I was worried about you.’

  He struggled upright, his stomach clamped hard like iron; it seemed to him that for all a lifetime’s carrying a gun and arresting pimps and wife-beaters and drug-addicted street thieves, he’d never really been frightened by anything in his life before this. Luisa looked into his face.

  ‘It’s very small,’ she said. ‘I’m not afraid of it.’

  There were so many things Sandro wanted to say, and he found he could not say any of them. I love you, would be a start. I can’t live without you, although that would probably be the wrong thing to say, under the circumstances.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’d better get going, too.’ It was Saturday, but there was no point just sitting here, on his own. ‘Can you do lunch? We could have a bite at the Cammillo.’

  ‘Sorry, caro,’ she said, sounding like she meant it, ‘the shop’s always so busy today.’

  At the door he found himself with his arms around her, his face pressed against hers, his eyes squeezed shut.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘We’ll go together.’ She pulled back, gave him a wild-eyed look. ‘To the doctor’s,’ he said. ‘We’ll go to see the doctor together.’

  Lucia Gentileschi’s apartment was much closer to the house than Sandro’s office; the Via dei Pilastri was five minutes north of Santa Croce on foot. Her voice through the intercom was clear and steady and she buzzed him up with a firm hand.

  It was a nice building, four hundred years old perhaps; the hall and stairway well kept, with retouched decoration on the vaulted ceiling, pink and grey, and a smell of wax and cleaning fluid in the air. Lucia Gentileschi opened the door to him before he even had a chance to ring, and Sandro found himself briskly ushered into a light and spacious sitting room, almost completely bare of ornament except for a tall candle, burning on a table.

  Holding his coat in her arms, Lucia Gentileschi saw him looking at the candle flickering in the bright room. ‘We light a candle for the dead,’ she said. ‘In the time of mourning.’ She hung the coat up.

  For a second he didn’t understand at all. And then it dawned on him; the slight foreignness he’d detected in Lucia Gentileschi’s manner, a huge eight-armed candelabrum in the window of the dusty little shop he’d passed, the street itself. The great green-domed synagogue, for God’s sake, just around the corner in the Via Farini, never mind Ruth’s Kosher Café; Sandro had lived in Florence for close to sixty years and had for all of those known that this was what you might call the Jewish quarter, if such things could still be said.

  ‘Yes,’ was all he said. ‘Of course.’

  Still on her feet, Lucia Gentileschi eyed him, small and fierce. You should meet my wife, he thought.

  ‘You didn’t know?’ she said, with the ghost of a smile. Sandro gave an apologetic s
hrug.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I mean, it was one of the reasons the police made me angry. That they thought it was significant. Because Claudio was two years in a concentration camp, they thought it meant he was more likely to commit suicide.’ Her pale eyes gleamed.

  ‘Two years?’ he said. ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Aged seventeen to nineteen,’ she said, and Sandro bowed his head to hide his shame.

  ‘We weren’t religious,’ said Lucia. She looked at the candle. ‘At least, I thought we were not. There are some things that turn out to – to bring comfort even if you have spent your life finding rational ways to deny them.’

  ‘Would your husband have disapproved?’ asked Sandro, nodding towards the candle.

  She thought a moment. ‘Yes,’ she said, and smiled the smile again that had made her beautiful before. ‘But he didn’t like demonstrations of any kind, not saying. . .’ She hesitated. ‘Not saying one loved him, for example. Even if one did.’

  She gestured at the long, low sofa, upholstered in dark linen, and tentatively Sandro sat. It felt strange to be interviewing someone without the benefit of uniform. He took out his notebook.

  ‘Do you have the post-mortem report?’ he asked. She reached towards the low table where the candle was burning and he saw that she had set it out ready for him, in a pale brown folder. Sandro opened it and scanned it. The yellow water of the Arno had been found in Claudio Gentileschi’s lungs; some lesions seen in the brain consistent with late-onset dementia although this would be confirmed by a neurologist at a later date. There was some bruising that would have occurred at or around the time of death, but it was not definitive; it did not unequivocally indicate violence. He had been alive when he had entered the water.

  There were photographs with the report, which was unusual. He took them out, looking up at Lucia Gentileschi. He found he didn’t want to look at the pictures; perhaps two years out of the force had changed him more than he’d thought.

  ‘I asked for copies,’ she said. ‘They were shocked, I think. But I insisted; I knew that I would need them if I were to – well. If I went to you. I had to pay for them.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sandro, and he sighed. He looked again at the top of the post-mortem report, where the investigating police officer would be named. Gianluca Scappatoio; not a bad guy, but not a brain surgeon. I’ll talk to Pietro, thought Sandro.

  He looked at the pictures then, quickly. He had seen drowned bodies before; he expected the pallor, the swelling to the tissues. He could see that Gentileschi had not been in the water long because he still looked human. You could imagine him alive. A heavy, handsome man, short-cropped white hair and a strong Roman nose. There were photographs of bruising to one arm, and abrasions to the palms of the hands. He put them away.

  There were photographs of the contents of his pockets – a wallet, a handkerchief, a set of house keys. A separate photograph of tiny white pebbles.

  ‘Found in his shoes,’ said Lucia. ‘It’s crazy, isn’t it? Little stones. I don’t want to know, or about the kind of waterweed they found clinging to his trousers.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Sandro. ‘They must be thorough, though. Sometimes these things tell us something.’ He paused a moment. ‘No mobile phone?’

  ‘If he’d had a mobile, I might have called him,’ she said, her eyes faraway. ‘He didn’t like mobiles.’

  ‘Didn’t he?’ he said. ‘Tell me. Tell me about your husband.’

  The conversation went on for two hours, perhaps more, and by the time they had finished Sandro felt quite done in. He had filled half his notebook. He knew the daily routine – the route he took on his morning walk, the swim at the Bellariva twice a week, winter and summer. The career he’d had as an architect in Milan and Verona before coming back here and settling in Florence with his own small practice.

  ‘Government work,’ said Lucia. ‘Some restoration, some buildings for the comune. Nothing grand.’

  ‘Did he enjoy it?’

  ‘He didn’t mind, in the end,’ she said. ‘He always wanted to build something wonderful and new, but he got too old. He got tired.’ The lines in her face deepened, making her look old herself, and sad.

  ‘Are these his paintings?’ asked Sandro, pointing at one of the large canvases on the wall for something to say. They were abstract paintings, mysterious to Sandro. Large rectangular patches of mostly sombre colours – a dark purple like a bruise, rough, chalky white, the grey-green of church stone – that bled into each other.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lucia. ‘He was a wonderful painter. But he stopped, oh, maybe ten years ago. Started the swimming instead.’

  Sandro debated whether these were the actions of a man who took steps to keep his life on track; a man who modified his expectations. A man deserving of respect.

  ‘The last morning,’ he said gently, and she nodded obediently. ‘Was everything normal? Was there anything – anything at all out of the ordinary?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing.’

  So, thought Sandro, if anything happened to his state of mind, it happened after he left home.

  ‘Do you have another photograph?’ he asked gently. ‘I think I’ll need one.’

  She stood up, crossed to a long, modern desk in the corner of the room; it had a scroll top and he watched as she sat at the chair, took out a key and opened it. He could see from the set of her shoulders that he had exhausted her. Inside the desk Sandro could see a neat stack of document folders and a box like the kind a shop would use for petty cash. She took a small envelope from one corner and withdrew a passport-sized photograph; she looked at it for a tiny second before holding it out to Sandro.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘There are so many things – I didn’t know how much there would be to do. His desk. His papers. The bank account – I have to set everything in order. And people come round, to pay their respects, people one hardly knows. . .’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sandro, turning away from that thought in his head, the thought of the practicalities of restoring equilibrium, with half your life taken from you. ‘I should leave you in peace.’

  ‘Do you have any children?’ he asked, at the door. It was an impertinent question, which was why he saved it until last. Why should it make any difference to whether or not a man committed suicide? He himself had no children. But he wanted to know.

  ‘No,’ said Lucia Gentileschi, but her face was clear and serene as she said it, unclouded by grief or disappointment. ‘We couldn’t have them. It never mattered; we always said it ends with us.’

  And Sandro found himself thinking of Luisa, whose face would have told a different story if she had been asked the same question.

  ‘May I ask, Signora,’ he said, knowing that he had to say it, ‘why you are so sure that your husband did not take his own life?’

  It was as though her pale eyes were looking right through him, to something far away.

  ‘Because he would have taken me with him,’ she said simply. ‘He would never have left me behind.’

  On the pavement outside Sandro stood in the drizzle, suddenly unable to move for the sound of her words, beating like a pulse in his ears. Had he even thought of Luisa, when he’d made his own desperate bid to escape the mess he’d made? What was it that had saved him, then? Years of training, comradeship, duty, a certain doggedness, a lack of imagination? All and none; the truth was, he was afraid to remember that night. The precise quality of despair was a dangerous thing, and the instant at which there had been nothing and no one between him and the final step was not one Sandro wanted to summon up. But if he wanted to help Lucia Gentileschi, it looked like he was going to have to.

  We are all afraid of being alone.

  It was a declaration of love, and Sandro must prove it justified. He had felt the white light of her gaze as she’d said it. ‘He would never have left me behind.’

  Chapter Seven

  For Some Reason It took the ringing of the phone in Hiroko’s apartmen
t to remind Iris that of course there was no school, because it was Saturday.

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Hiroko asked with concern, when she told her where she was going.

  Iris told her she’d be all right. It was a gloomy old place, true enough, and she’d been grateful not to have to go there last night, in the dark, but the truth was, she wanted some time to herself in the Piazza d’Azeglio before Paolo Massi got there with the carabinieri. She felt a need to pace the apartment, to look at things that they probably wouldn’t understand.

  It had rained in the night, and the air was fresh. The streets were gleaming with puddles and amazingly empty, because it was Saturday, Iris supposed, and still early. She felt warm and clean from the long shower she’d taken at Hiroko’s as she passed the red and grey ironwork of the big covered market where trucks were unloading; she saw a rack of meat carcases wheeled inside up a ramp, and a man obscured by cases of artichokes stacked up in his arms. Life went on; it still looked like an orderly universe – not one in which people could just disappear.

  It wasn’t that she minded being on her own. She had been used to spending at least part of every weekend alone anyway. Ronnie was often no more than a hump under the duvet sleeping off a heavy night, or had been invited somewhere, lunch parties, bowling, skating. She’d even been skiing, one Sunday, with a group of Italian boys she’d met at the Zoe; they collected her in a flash SUV and whisked her off somewhere in the white-topped hills to the west, bringing her back at nightfall. There were so many people; Ronnie’d known so many people. Were they all. . . suspects? Iris thought wryly that it would be an awful lot easier for the police if she’d gone missing instead of Ronnie.

  Was it unnatural, Iris wondered, the way she was feeling? It was as though somewhere in Hiroko’s dim, quiet, apartment her brain had found a way of dividing it up, separating the terror of what might have happened to Ronnie from the puzzle of it. She went over and over it, until her head began to hurt.

  Iris walked on, down a street lined with stalls being set up. Now the tourists were starting to drift in, clogging the road, and so she turned between two stalls to get to the pavement, a shaded, forgotten space where the shop-owners chatted on their doorsteps, as yet untroubled by customers.