The Drowning River

by Christobel Kent

  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.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  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?’

  ‘If I had, I’d have walloped them,’ he said, with another scowl. ‘Heard ’em, mind you. I was finishing my merenda, around twelve, twelve-thirty. Bloody great crash, and a girl shrieking in English. Or German.’

  Despite herself, Luisa raised her eyes to heaven; surely even an old misery like this would know the difference? And if only he’d been quicker on his feet. Unfortunately the old man caught her expression, and their time was up. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough of people like you.’ And the door slammed shut behind him.

  Giulietta stuck some gum in her mouth, considering the closed door. ‘She must have got out again, somehow,’ she said thoughtfully. She pointed down towards the gate and they wandered back as far as the empty pedestal. ‘Maybe it was her knocked it off, that what you’re thinking? In some kind of a struggle?’

  Luisa bent and picked up a piece of terracotta from among the gravel. The hedge was relatively dense around the pedestal, but as she straightened she saw that a hole had been torn through it out of sight, and fairly recently; behind the hedge was an extended stretch of dark, stunted wood, leading uphill. Someone might have come out here, hidden behind the urn – only they came out too suddenly, and knocked it off. Then they’d have had to make a break for it pretty quickly; down towards the Annalena gate, for example.

  Luisa sighed, frustrated. ‘Sandro told me there was no footage of her coming out again.’ She slid her arm through Giulietta’s. ‘Up,’ she said. ‘Let’s get some height.’

  At the top of the wide cypress avenue they turned and looked back down.

  ‘Plenty of ways out,’ said Giulietta. Her eyes darted across the expanse of trees, bordered by houses, the viale to the south, the higgledy-piggledy rear facades of the Via Romana to the west.

  They folded their arms and fell silent. Below them the city lay under a blanket of cloud and drizzle, around them a bewildering number of paths led away through the dark green hedges.

  ‘Gawd,’ said Giulietta, scowling at the rain. ‘This weather.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Luisa, but she wasn’t really listening. The view across the soft green drizzled hills to the glinting facade of the little church seemed to have imprinted itself on the inside of her eyelids. ‘I don’t want to die,’ she said suddenly and definitely.

  And all at once Giulietta’s scarecrow arms were around Luisa, then she sprang back, as abruptly as she’d bestowed the embrace. ‘You’re not going to die,’ she said, hugging herself angrily. ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘Well,’ said Luisa.

  ‘You’re not,’ said Giulietta with certainty, and for a minute or two they stared at each other, before Giulietta broke the spell. ‘Are we meeting Sandro for lunch, or what?’

  ‘You hungry?’ said Luisa, who realized that she hadn’t felt hungry for days.

  ‘Starving,’ said Giulietta, cheerfully. ‘Isn’t there a bar in this dump?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Luisa, trying to remember the route.

  ‘Here,’ said Giulietta, and there was a signpost, Fountain of Neptune, it said, Forte di Belvedere, Vineyard, Kaffeehaus.

  Vineyard? Luisa pondered the word; someone had told her about the vineyard.

  ‘Whys it in German?’ complained Giulietta. ‘Kaffeehaus?’

  Luisa shrugged. ‘I think it’s modelled on something Austrian, you know,’ she said. ‘They go in for coffee houses, cake and all that, whipped cream.’

  Giulietta brightened. ‘All right,’ she said grudgingly. Luisa remembered the struggle it had been to get her to eat a slice of bread, once upon a time.

  As they came past the little row of stunted vines en route, Luisa spotted something that stopped her in her tracks.

  ‘That’s it,’ she whispered, pointing.

  ‘What?’ said Giulietta, impatiently.

  ‘Shh,’ said Luisa.

  ‘Cats?’ said Giulietta, not bothering to lower her voice. Because under the hedge beyond the little vineyard there were four or five cats in shades of grey, as if bred to the shadows, clustered around a bowlful of food. They made soft mewling, growling sounds as they competed for space. They didn’t seem to be bothered by the presence of humans.

  ‘It’s where the girl’s bag was found,’ Luisa said. Behind the vineyard, Sandro had said.

  ‘Cat Lady found it,’ she went on, thoughtfully. Giulietta snorted.

  ‘Loony, more like,’ she said, and Luisa put a finger to her lips. Giulietta followed her gaze; there crouched behind the hedge and opening a family-size tin of veal and liver was a woman in a cheap transparent mac, hood over her thin hair, bare legs in German sandals. She seemed almost as oblivious to the observers as her cats
were.

  Repelled by the woman’s appearance, Luisa struggled for sympathy. What made a woman behave like this? Out in the rain, feeding cats. Thwarted maternal feelings? The need to be needed. Judge not, lest ye be judged. Sandro needs me, she thought, and found herself wishing he needed her less.

  ‘Hello?’ she said and the woman turned her head sharply, in that instant echoing the half-feral movement of a cat’s head at the bowl. She scowled.

  ‘Are you – um. . .’ and Luisa searched her memory for the name, came up with it in triumph, ‘Signora DiTommaso? Fiamma DiTommaso?’ Cat Lady. ‘Are you the one, found the bag?’ The woman glared at them and turned her back, shovelling empty cans and Tupperware and spoons into a hessian sack and then, before they could work out what was happening, had set off at a lopsided scurry between the hedgerows and was gone.

  ‘Hey,’ shouted Giulietta belatedly. ‘What’s the rush?’ She turned to Luisa in frustration. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Luisa, thoughtfully, ‘I’ve got her address.’ And she patted the bag slung across her body.

  Giulietta looked at her admiringly. ‘You’re doing this properly,’ she said.

  Luisa looked her in the eye. ‘I’m not going to let Sandro fail on this one for lack of a bit of back-up,’ she said. ‘It’s his first job, since – well. All his life he’s been too proud to ask for help, or advice, and look where it got him last time; chucked out of the police, even though he saved two lives that time, if we count yours. A life’s work, and all he was trying to do was the right thing – but that’s not always the point, is it?’

  She was ranting; Giulietta was looking almost alarmed. ‘All right, all right,’ she said. ‘I just meant, you’re good at this stuff, that’s all.’ But at the sight of the woman’s disappearing back Luisa felt weary, suddenly, and it showed.

  ‘Come on,’ said Giulietta, taking her arm. ‘Kaffeehaus, this way.’