The Drowning River

by Christobel Kent

  Sandro tried to laugh, an exaggeration. ‘You do have a wife?’ she said, smiling, and he managed a smile back.

  ‘I’ll call a cab,’ he said, to placate her. ‘OK?’

  Outside on the street Sandro stood in a borrowed raincoat three sizes too large for him, and waited for a cab. Claudio Gentileschi had been a big man, and as he pulled the coat around him an image of that broad back rolling in the grey water came back to Sandro with a shiver that was partly fever, and partly the horrors.

  The horrors had come on with full force after his first dead body, when he’d been twenty-four and attending the scene of a traffic accident in the Borgo degli Albizzi. Nothing lurid; a boy knocked down by a motorino, struck his head on the kerb and was dead within ten minutes. The life had just gone out of him, without a sound, and that night Sandro, who had been first on the scene, had lain in his bed rigid with the effort of not seeing, all over again, the pallor that had come over the boy’s face, the horrible slackness in his limbs. And how the boy’s mother had come running, still in her apron, awkwardly down the street.

  He’d had to learn that there was a trick to dealing with the dead – with dead bodies, at least – that was learned gradually, with repeated exposure. One had to be methodical, and at all costs to consider the corpse as just another kind of matter, no longer animate. Respect was important, however; he’d seen men jeer at corpses – policemen and others, and once a woman, kicking the body of her dead, violent husband as she was being handcuffed – and such people, in his experience, never returned to full humanity. Cells died off, and could not be replaced. Sandro had instead developed a kind of impassivity, the mask of a stolid, imperturbable officer who could keep going when the younger ones had to go outside to vomit.

  Luisa used to say to him, long ago, ‘I can’t talk to you when you’ve got that face on.’ He hadn’t really understood what she meant; he’d thought, then, that it was exactly what was required; they weren’t paid to have feelings.

  But it wasn’t some sort of technique, it was a trick, all along, an illusion; the girl’s death fifteen years ago had proved that. Doggedly Sandro had passed information to her father, collating, photocopying, posting as efficiently as a machine, and all the time a connection had been loose, fizzing away. The feelings hadn’t gone away; out of sight, they’d mutated into something altogether harder to manage. The horrors. In the rain Sandro pulled the coat tighter, binding himself to stop the shivering. He realized that he wasn’t sure what to do next.

  Something bleeped in his pocket: a new message. Although Serena Hutton didn’t grace him with any kind of message at all, in fact, only the name, Iris March, and a complicated mobile number with a foreign prefix. His heart sank at the thought of calling this English girl; not even twenty, probably, no Italian, she’d be immature, hopeless, idiotic. He pressed dial, and held the phone to his ear. It rang three, five, seven, times; he was just about to hang up when it clicked and he heard an English voice say, nervously, ‘Pronto?’

  His taxi was now approaching down the narrow street; holding the phone against his ear with his shoulder, Sandro held up a hand. He climbed in, at the same time introducing himself, and hoped he didn’t sound too out of it. All he wanted was a nice warm office and a secretary to connect him, but it wasn’t going to happen, was it?

  He put a hand over the receiver; ‘Piazza Tasso,’ he said to the driver. He’d promised Lucia Gentileschi he would go straight home. Sorry, Lucia, he thought, then took his hand off the receiver.

  ‘Should I speak in English?’ he said, with dread. He didn’t know if he was up to it.

  ‘It’s all right. Italian is all right.’

  Iris March sounded jumpy, on edge; he remembered that the carabiniere had called her hysterical. Sandro could hear background noise, men’s voices talking, traffic sounds. Was she with some gang of friends, off out on the town?

  This was useless, he thought; afterwards he was terrified by how close he had come to hanging up, and not hearing what Iris March had to say. But then she said, ‘I’m so glad you called, I didn’t know what to do.’

  There was something in her voice that spoke to him – humility, directness, desperation – and the image he’d had of this girl fell away. Poor kid, he thought, and then it all came tumbling out, half in Italian, half in English, something about the missing girl’s boyfriend, about a plan to leave the city, and then he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He wondered if he was more addled than he’d thought.

  He made her repeat it twice; the name, twice.

  ‘He’s called Claudio, we think,’ she said down the crackling line. ‘An old man called Claudio.’ And a fit of shivering almost took him at that moment, a shock reaction. He pressed his lips together while she spoke. ‘We tried the number Jackson had for him, but there was no answer. There was that message you get, in questo momento non e raggiungibile –’

  ‘A mobile number?’ asked Sandro, and waited while she turned and said something to another person. In the background he heard a radio and he understood immediately that she was in a taxi too. He thought of their two taxis hissing through the wet night streets, towards their separate destinations, and he felt the fever rising in him.

  She was back. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘a mobile.’ There was another pause, then she read out the number to him. It would be dead as a doornail, wouldn’t it, Claudio’s mobile; Sandro wondered where it was, because it hadn’t been on his body. She went on. ‘He – this guy could have been the last person to see her, couldn’t he?’

  ‘And you have no idea where they were meeting?’ Sandro felt a desperate longing for witnesses, sightings. Let it be far away from the Boboli, let someone have seen Claudio shake her hand and wave her goodbye, alive and well.

  ‘I’m not even sure – well, no,’ she said, sounding downcast. ‘It’s just – a kind of hunch, you know? Do you think we can find him, this Claudio?’

  ‘Listen,’ Sandro said carefully, ‘I think it would be a good idea to have a meeting.’

  This girl was the only person he had encountered so far who seemed to be worried about Veronica Hutton’s disappearance; why did she also have to be the only one to make the connection between Veronica Hutton and Claudio Gentileschi?

  ‘Maybe you’re busy tonight?’ he said, but even as he said it he knew it would be a mistake to do anything but go home and sleep; he was almost grateful when she said, after a long pause, ‘Um, well, tomorrow morning would be better.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you. In the morning.’ Suddenly, the morning seemed a long way off.

  He gave her his number, concentrating hard on not letting his teeth chatter. He fished in his top pocket for the tachipirina he always kept there for headaches and dry-swallowed a couple. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, keeping his voice gentle. ‘We’ll find her.’ And he heard her swallow a sob.

  He fell back on the worn leather seat of the cab, ridiculously exhausted by the mere effort of the conversation. The car rolled on through the streets that gleamed in the sheeting rain; when eventually they drew up on the corner of the Piazza Tasso and the Via del Leone where Claudio Gentileschi’s bank stood, it was coming down so relentlessly and with such force that it bounced back up off the flagstones, like hail.

  The bank was a hundred metres from Sandro’s office: if he’d set up there a month earlier, he might himself have seen Claudio Gentileschi going in and out. It was closed; wearily Sandro looked at his watch; six-thirty now, of course it was bloody closed, what did he expect? He realized that he had had some idea of standing on the pavement outside it and watching, waiting for the gut instinct that had always served him well to tell him which passer-by might recognize the crumpled photograph of Claudio Gentileschi he had in his wallet.

  But the streets were deserted in the rain, and slumped, feverish, in the back of the cab Sandro felt as if every skill he’d learned as a policeman, every instinct he’d developed over thirty years, had deserted him.

  ‘This it?’ sa
id the cab driver over his shoulder, startling him back to himself.

  ‘Ah, could you,’ Sandro grappled with the situation, ‘give me a minute?’ Then added, ‘Wait there.’ The driver shrugged, tapped the meter. ‘Fine by me,’ he said. ‘Take your time.’

  Sandro stood outside the bank’s dark windows and peered inside. There were close to a million euros of Claudio’s money in there, in this dingy little back-street branch. He pressed his back against the facade in a fruitless attempt to stay out of the wet; this was the place, though. These humble San Frediano streets were Claudio’s secret life. This was his bank, the Cestello was his local; his other place must be somewhere around here.

  His telefonino rang again; he thought he should go to his office and dry out, but he found he couldn’t move. With fumbling fingers he retrieved the phone and found himself talking again to the pasty-faced carabiniere he’d spoken to on the way out of the station that afternoon.

  ‘The old guy?’ said the carabiniere without preamble. Giacomini was the desk-officer’s name, thought Sandro blearily, how come he could remember that when everything else was fuzzy? ‘The one you asked me to look for on the CCTV?’

  ‘Yes?’ said Sandro, his heart sinking; it was like opening an envelope you knew contained bad news.

  He was right. ‘Yup,’ said Giacomini, ‘found him all right, that was some hunch.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘In, at the Annalena gate, 11.20.’

  ‘Out again?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Giacomini. ‘Not so far. But he could’ve –’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ said Sandro with a heavy heart. ‘He must have come out of the Porta Romana gate.’ Because he did come out, that much they knew. What he’d wanted was proof Claudio had left the Boboli alone.

  ‘Looking like, sort of blank, he was, on his way in,’ said Giacomini, musing. ‘On another planet.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Sandro. ‘He had Alzheimer’s.’ He felt a surge of empathy for poor Claudio, like some big wounded bull elephant blundering through a habitat turned hostile, his world growing unrecognizable around him. Would that face tell him anything? That he’d had some kind of brainstorm, and had abducted or hurt or killed a young woman, then concealed her body? He thought of the gardens, all those woodstores and toolsheds. Or taken her off with him, to his other place? Taken her back to the bolthole his wife had known nothing about, until now.

  ‘Can I come in and get a look?’

  Giacomini sighed. ‘Not tonight,’ he said, ‘no way, I’m off in twenty minutes. Monday morning?’

  Monday morning? Monday morning will be too late, thought Sandro, because he was in full possession of the knowledge, dull and sinister, that every hour that passed, every minute, made it less likely Veronica Hutton would be found alive. It was how it was, with abductions; it was how it had been when Lucas Marsh’s daughter went missing from that swimming pool nearly twenty years ago. And just as he had on that occasion, he had to fight the despair that rose in him, the nagging voice that said, It’s too late already. You’re wasting your time.

  As if he heard something in the silence, Giacomini sighed. ‘How about I email you the stills?’ he said. ‘You’ll have given us your email address? Can do that, wouldn’t take a minute.’

  Not about to admit that computer technology was too much for him at the best of times, Sandro gave in. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Sure.’ He needed help, and he appreciated the hand the man was holding out to him. ‘Thanks.’

  As he hung up, Sandro caught the cab driver’s curious gaze at him up through the window, open for the cigarette he’d lit. He felt the shivering rise up again, and struggled to control it in front of the man. He looked away, trying to will a miracle. An answer.

  Across the way, the scrubby grass of the Piazza Tasso contained another children’s playground; though this one was newer, it looked just as dismal under the shroud of rain. On one of the swings the hooded figure of some large child swung back and forth monotonously in the pouring rain, while his frail-looking mother bent over him, trying to persuade him home.

  He needed help. As he stared blindly at the scene, suddenly Sandro felt entirely overwhelmed. Lucia’s silent grief; the nagging terror for a missing child; the brute intractability of the facts, of hidden money and secret apartments and lost handbags; he was drowning under it. And the biggest, blackest wave, rising far out to sea and rushing towards him, was Monday morning, and a tiny lump in Luisa’s breast: his breast, his pillow, his beloved.

  I am afraid, he thought. I am afraid of death.

  For a moment it seemed to Sandro that it was simply too much for him: he would send the cab away, stand in the rain like a vagrant until he dropped and someone else could take over.

  As he stared, the woman at the swing straightened and came away from the intractable child and through the rain Sandro saw that it wasn’t a child, but a young man, holding a comic book up to his face. And as the woman hurrying towards him raised her hand, trying to get his cab, that she wasn’t anyone’s mother. It was Giulietta Sarto.

  ‘Sandro?’ she said, dashing across the road.

  ‘Do you know him?’ said Sandro, staring at the young man on the swing, wondering if he was delirious.

  ‘It’s the funny kid,’ she said, impatiently. ‘Comic-book Boy, everyone knows him, Jesus Christ, Sandro, look at you!’ She took both his shoulders in her hands.

  ‘What was he talking to you about?’ he said, wondering if he was making sense.

  ‘Oh, dogs, asking me about a guy I know – well, I guess we both know him – keeps asking if he’s got a dog. The kid’s obsessed, but he’s harmless. He’s worried about the goddamn dog, I tell you, there is no dog, I don’t know what he’s talking about. What I’m worried about is you, Sandro. What the hell are you up to? You’re soaked to the bone.’ She leaned in closer, staring into his face as she used to when she was in rehab, and they’d told him it was because she had to relearn the idea of personal space. ‘You’re not well.’

  Sandro found he didn’t have it in him to agree or not. He did feel very odd.

  ‘This your cab?’ she asked, and the driver answered for him, ‘Get on with it, I can’t hang about all day,’ flicking his cigarette away into the gutter.

  ‘I’m taking you home to Luisa,’ she said, and before he could argue she opened the car door and shoved him inside.

  In the warm dark of the cab, the radio burbled, about the rain, and an anniversary. In the Casentino a mudslide had buried a small hamlet, and above Lucca a weir had collapsed under the weight of water; the president of the republic would be visiting the stricken village.

  Sandro heard the driver snort. ‘Lot of good he’ll be,’ he said. The voices continued, an old contadino talking about 1966; a government spokesman brushed him aside, talking over him. Flood defences were holding, he said with weighty assurance, the rain should ease overnight, although more was forecast in the morning. Tomorrow there would be no repeat of November, 1966.

  Flood defences holding for the time being; no, repeat, the rain should ease – the words went round and round in Sandro’s head, absolving him. The defences were holding.

  ‘Tell me about Comic-book Boy,’ he mumbled to Giulietta Sarto. ‘I think I’d like a proper introduction.’ From the expression on her face he could tell he’d stopped making sense.

  At three in the morning by the small, leather-bound clock on her bedside table – the clock that Ma had given her when she’d gone away to school at thirteen – Iris raised herself on her elbow, leaned across Jackson’s humped shoulder beside her in the narrow bed, and whispered.

  ‘Jackson?’ Then, louder, ‘Jackson?’ He made a noise, still asleep.

  ‘I want you to go,’ she said, in her normal voice, and waited, her back against the wall. After a minute Jackson sat up beside her, alert in the moonlight but not all there, still actually asleep even as he answered her.

  ‘OK,’ he said, unquestioning, fumbling for his trainers. ‘’Sssa time?’

&nbs
p; ‘Late,’ she said, and he just nodded.

  ‘OK.’ Now he was awake.

  He swayed as he stood over her, shoes on, belt buckle undone. He felt in his pocket for his keys; she heard them jingle. ‘You all right?’

  ‘Mmm-hmm,’ said Iris, meaning to say, of course I am, but not able to find the right words, the right tone. He leaned down towards her but she turned her face away so he got her cheek. She felt his dry lips brush it.

  The door closed behind him but she could hear him on the stairs, then the street gate rattled and clanged, a deep silence settling like fog in his wake, filling the flat’s dark corners.

  Even though the whole point of telling him to go had been that Iris would get some sleep, at last, with the clang of the gate her thoughts set off again. She wondered where he was going back to, at three in the morning. She didn’t know where he lived, or who he lived with; she knew he could get angry and he had a police record in the States, and she knew he had an iPhone, and that was about it. She knew what his skin smelled like, now. What have I done? she wondered.

  The detective guy had called as they were getting into the cab on the way home. Sandro Cellini. She had felt Jackson next to her as she spoke into the phone, listening intently as she tried to remember to say everything that was important. She’d felt breathless as if she was being interviewed, more nervous than when she’d been speaking to the carabiniere earlier; it all seemed so absolutely hopeless. Searching for needles in haystacks, old painters called Claudio in a city full of painters, looking for Ronnie’s mystery man when he could have been any one of dozens of playboy Italians in blazers, American college boys in Bermudas or even a sculptor with his own studio.

  When Jackson could have made the whole thing up, because she only had his word for it. And Jackson had been the last person to see Ronnie.

  She told herself the detective was taking it seriously, though there had been long silences on the phone; maybe he was writing it all down. She had to believe in him because he was their last chance, Ronnie was slipping through their fingers and only Sandro Cellini could catch her. She hoped he had been writing it all down. She had felt Jackson’s long, cool fingers slip between her own as she spoke.