The Drowning River

by Christobel Kent

  Luisa thought a moment, screwing up her face as she did when she was making an effort to remember something, and the sight of it made Sandro stop fretting over whatever it was he’d wanted to ask her, and just look at her.

  ‘Maybe she never turned up?’ she said, dubiously. ‘Or maybe – well, I did think. . .’ She hesitated. ‘Something did occur to me when we were up there – ’ And she stopped, and illumination spread across her features. ‘The umbrellas,’ she said triumphantly, ‘the terrace. Tuesday was a beautiful day, they would have had customers out on the terrace. They’d have had extra staff, for the terrace, might have been laid off when the rain started. Wouldn’t have known about any of this.’

  ‘Right,’ said Sandro, holding up a hand. ‘That’s good, that’s something, they met on the terrace, we knew they had to meet somewhere. We can get hold of that waiter – tell you what, you two can get hold of that waiter, but please, before you say anything else can you tell me again?’

  He had Luisa’s attention at least, although she was looking at him as though he was mad.

  ‘Can you please repeat to me,’ said Sandro, trying to sound as calm as he could, ‘what you said before? About his work.’

  ‘That they were – that they looked too old, the drawings looked too old for him to have done them? That the landlord might have cleaned the place out? That’s what it looks like to me.’

  Sandro held the sheaf of papers up to the pale, grey light. ‘Too old,’ he murmured to himself; rubbed a finger along the foxed edge of the vellum.

  ‘You don’t think – they’re stolen? Could they be valuable?’ Luisa was peering over his shoulder at the drawings, and he could feel the warmth of her breast against the back of his arm.

  Slowly Sandro shook his head, thinking of the money. Regular payments into that bank account. ‘Not stolen, at least not exactly,’ he said.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘You’d have to take them to an expert to be sure,’ he said cautiously, ‘But. . .’ And he passed the flat of his hand over the worn surface of the paper, held it up close to his face, the reddish sepia of the faded ink, the worn edges. ‘But I think they’re faked. I think they’re high-quality, beautiful, almost undetectable fakes.’ Sorry, Claudio, he added silently, even though there was a part of him in awe of the skill. They were beautiful.

  ‘And his wife never knew a thing,’ said Luisa.

  ‘He couldn’t have told her,’ he said, thinking of Lucia Gentileschi’s small, upright figure, hands folded in her lap. ‘Maybe he wanted to make sure she had enough, after he was gone.’

  What was she going to say, when he told her? He ducked his head, not wanting to meet Luisa’s clear, outraged gaze, as if he was Claudio himself, found out, and she Lucia.

  But before she could speak his phone rang; Sandro pulled it out, promising Luisa with his eyes that whoever it was, he’d get rid of them. Only it was Pietro, ranting.

  ‘Why the hell’s Alitalia faxing me passenger lists on a Sunday lunchtime? Sort yourself out, Sandro, get yourself a secretary, and a badge, for the love of God.’

  Sandro let him simmer down. There were six or seven no-shows on the outward-bound flight to Sicily, and of those names one also cancelled his flight back to Florence on the Friday.

  ‘My God,’ said Sandro, when he heard the name. ‘So it was him.’

  He had seen them go into the house, Claudio’s house. He had been on the swing. The swing in Piazza Tasso was better than the ones on Lungarno Santa Rosa, it was new and wide with a rubber seat made out of an old car tyre; on Santa Rosa they were narrow and hard. And mostly broken.

  Even though he was getting wetter and wetter, Tomi felt comfortable on his swing, and his mother let him out even if it did mean he came in wet because it made the day go more smoothly, that was what she said. He had tried to explain that to the skinny woman he liked, last night, when she tried to get him to go home.

  His name was Tomi – for Tomasso – although he knew that they called him Comic-book Boy. He wasn’t any good at remembering names himself so Comic-book Boy seemed good enough.

  Tomi preferred it when it wasn’t raining, obviously, even if he was having difficulty remembering a time when it hadn’t been raining. But it had been sunny when he had seen Claudio go down into the water, hadn’t it?

  They’d been in there twenty-eight minutes by the underwater diving watch his mother had given him for Christmas last year. Claudio was dead, Tomi knew that much. He wasn’t stupid, but he just didn’t want to think about it. Tomi had been going to wait for them to come out again but he decided he would go over to Santa Rosa, anyway. His mother had said that if he took his long raincoat with the hood he could stay out until Nonna came over, which would be at four-thirty. And he wanted to check on the dog. If it was a dog: he hadn’t even seen it yet.

  He got off the swing. Lupo Alberto had to be rolled in a plastic bag and stowed in his pocket; Tomi had a hundred and thirty-five books of the adventures of Lupo Alberto, that hapless farmyard wolf, and he kept them in a plastic box beside his bed. Even Lupo Alberto seemed to make his mother angry, sometimes, or at least it made her angry when he laughed too loudly on the bus with her, while he was reading.

  It was Sunday, so the bar was not open. During the week Tomi went in there to buy small tins of sweets at the till, and the barman was almost always nice to him. Once what he had thought was a euro was a foreign coin but the barman took it anyway. It took Tomi a long time to get across the road because there was traffic; a fire engine with the siren going went past and splashed his trousers below the raincoat; it was going out towards the Viadotto dell’Indiano. Tomi stared after it on the embankment where he stood beside the Circolo Rondinella, looking for smoke, but perhaps it wasn’t a fire, perhaps nothing stayed on fire in this rain. On the TV his mother had been watching fire engines rescue people from a mudslide.

  There was no noise from the dog any more. Had someone come to take it away? Claudio never had a dog himself, not that Tomi knew about; Tomi wondered if he’d mind about this one being kept in his special place. If Claudio had had a dog, Tomi would have certainly asked if he could take it for a walk sometimes. The dog he had heard yesterday, and the day before, was not being walked. Tomi supposed it might be a different kind of animal; it had been dark when it was put there, late on Wednesday night, bundled out of a car in the dark, and the sounds it had made were not familiar to him. Toto and Patak had drunk so much they were asleep, each on his own bench, and so he’d gone to the swing under the trees, looking at the branches being swept downstream in the dark. He’d seen a car pull up, and he’d kept very still.

  It was getting dark now although it wasn’t four-thirty yet; the lights were coming on all down the river along the embankments, flickering yellow. Yesterday the lights had come on just after lunchtime because of the rain, it had been so dark; yesterday he’d heard whatever animal it was, if it wasn’t a dog, banging against the side of the shack. You couldn’t hear it just walking along the river, you had to know where to look.

  Tomi leaned over the embankment wall beyond the Circolo Rondinella to get a better view, and he got a shock. The water was so high it had covered all the grass where Claudio had gone down. In his wallet Tomi still had the card that the man had given him, Cellini Sandro; he wondered if Cellini Sandro would be interested in the dog? Often, when he tried to tell people things, they ended up walking away, and his mother told him he’d gone on too long, they weren’t interested.

  The lower shacks were completely submerged, and he could see a plastic sack bulging to get out where boards had been splintered by the river pressing against them. Tomi thought about the animal inside and jerked his head back. I’d like to go home, he repeated to himself. It was what Mama had told him to say, if he got into trouble. I’d like to go home now, please.

  Chapter Twenty

  Their Faces, Really, Staring at her, expecting something of her, had sent Iris out of there. Hiroko’s calm, symmetrical features, on which I
ris could never discern even the ghost of emotion, and Sophia’s prettiness blurred with crying and the onset of a monumental sulk.

  ‘You’re going where?’ she’d said. ‘You’re going to see him?’

  Outside, the sound of the rain seemed to have been turned up, a dozen different kinds of percussion, pinging and clattering and rushing as it streamed down relentlessly. Iris had felt as if she was drowning in the big, dimly lit rooms of Hiroko’s apartment, as if she was underwater. And she needed to have it out with Jackson.

  ‘There’s something I need to ask him,’ she’d said.

  And there was a question she had for Jackson, but the guilty truth was that even as they all sat there talking about Ronnie’s watercolours and that small but blinding moment of revelation about Ronnie came to her, part of Iris knew she could use it as a way of going forward with him. Getting in a room with him, shouting, accusing, looking him in the eye, at least so she could know for once and for all whether she could believe a word Jackson said.

  She wanted to see him, simple as that. Was this what it was like, then, this boyfriend, girlfriend thing? It felt more like a big steel trap; a great heavy thing Iris had to drag around with her, or else gnaw her own leg off to escape it. Like Ronnie’s bag, weighted with useless ironmongery, hurled into the undergrowth.

  ‘On the north side of the piazza,’ said Sophia reluctantly, ‘seventeenth century, or so Jackson says.’ This contemptuously. ‘His flat’s on the first floor, got a big balcony overlooking the Neptune statue. There’s a restaurant on the ground floor called Medusa, or something.’

  Even in the downpour, its flagstones running with water, the piazza held tourists under a sea of black umbrellas; a queue stretching out from the massive stone stronghold that was the Palazzo Vecchio, a gaggle of them looking at the plaque where Savonarola had burned at the stake. Not much chance of burning anyone today, thought Iris. The sky was charcoal grey overhead, and low like a great tin lid. In the distance there were sirens.

  Following Hiroko into the kitchen to say goodbye, Iris had been feeling obscurely guilty about having accepted her hospitality when she’d needed it, only to turn her back on the girl now she needed to be alone. In the corner of the room was a small television tuned to a news channel, turned down low; there’d been a camera lens blurred with water and footage of a mudslide somewhere in the Alps. Hiroko had turned away from Iris to turn the sound up, which Iris had at first taken as the cold shoulder, but then she realized Hiroko wanted to hear what they were saying.

  ‘They’re talking about it being another 1966,’ said Hiroko. ‘Do you know? The flood, when all the cellars filled up, all the archives were destroyed. Art students came from all over the world to help clean up.’

  Standing now facing the long grey porticoes of the Uffizi, Iris imagined she could almost hear it above the distant sirens, the rushing of the river. There was something biblical about the quantity of it. What had Anna Massi said? Like the end of the world? ‘O dio,’ she’d said. ‘Like the apocalypse.’

  It had even been raining in Sicily, she’d said. But surely even in Sicily it rained in November? What had she meant?

  Iris had reached the restaurant called the Medusa, named, she registered, after the statue of Perseus standing opposite it on the far side of the piazza under the Loggiata dei Lanzi. A delicate little figure, poised on one foot, holding up the gorgon’s head by the hair.

  Above her she heard the sound of a window opening, and leaned back to look upwards. Forearms appeared on a stone balustrade, hands; she heard him clearing his throat. The underside of a chin; if she took a step backwards she’d see his face.

  Instead Iris moved to the door. There were only two bells; she pressed them both. Jackson’s voice when he answered was blurred and indistinct, but he buzzed her up.

  ‘I know who it is,’ she said, coming past him into a big, beautiful room with a coffered ceiling, filled with watery light. The windows were all open, and it was cold, but you could see along the rusticated flank of the old civic palace all the way down to the great arched windows at the far end of the Uffizi, the windows that overlooked the river. As she spoke defiantly, Iris tried not to think about what that expression on Jackson’s face had meant, just at the sight of her on his doorstep. Before she’d said a word.

  Surprise? Panic? Hangover? They’d drunk wine and some grappa last night, as well as the champagne in the afternoon; enough to give anyone a headache.

  ‘I know who Ronnie was going away with.’ Iris wanted to get a reaction out of him. ‘I know who the man was.’

  ‘Really?’ he said, blinking. ‘How do you know?’ Iris almost felt sorry for him, he seemed so unprepared, somehow. What kind of world did he live in, where you slept with one person, then another person, and none of it made any impression?

  ‘I worked it out,’ she said, dumping her bag on a massive slab of wood that, like some mediaeval refectory table, ran along the back wall of the room. It held a bust of a blind-eyed Roman noble, gazing out at the Palazzo Vecchio, and an empty pizza box. She rooted through the bag, flinging things out of it.

  ‘You want a coffee?’ he said, rubbing his eyes. She shook her head fiercely. Jackson took a bottle of water that stood on the refectory table and planted himself in a chair by the window.

  She held up the box of paints, took long steps over to the window and held them up in his face. ‘These,’ she said. ‘Ronnie went out and bought these, for her little trip.’

  ‘OK,’ said Jackson, warily. ‘They’re good paints.’

  ‘They’re the best, according to Sophia.’ Was it her imagination, or did he shift a little at the mention of her name?

  Iris went on. ‘But one hundred and forty-five euros? She wasn’t that rich. Who did she want to impress, buying the biggest set of the most expensive paints from Zecchi?’

  Jackson shrugged. There was another hard chair opposite him, and angrily she sat in it, leaning forward, elbows on her knees. He watched her.

  ‘And going to talk to painters? Kind of private tuition?’

  Realizing for the first time that she would have to tell him that Claudio was dead, Iris stopped abruptly and stared away from him out of the window. Something was going on in the Uffizi’s long rectangular courtyard; a rank of carabinieri were moving people backwards into the main piazza, cordoning something off. The sight stopped Iris in her tracks; she thought of the sirens she’d been hearing all day: too many of them, and the gathering chaos in the streets she’d walked through. What were the police doing out there? It must be the rain, she thought, and for a surreal and horrible moment Iris imagined that in all this upheaval, somehow Ronnie might be uncovered, some mudslide or tidal wave might sweep her wet, cold body up into the light. Was she accepting that Ronnie was dead? She stared, unblinking, out of the window.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jackson, impatiently. ‘And she’d asked Massi, too, hadn’t she? Extra work.’ He frowned.

  ‘Who would have been too much of a bigshot to come to her Halloween party?’ Jackson looked uneasy. ‘Apart from you, I mean,’ said Iris, wearily refocussing on him, overwhelmed with the hopelessness of it. ‘She told me, after the party, that she’d had enough of boys, they were useless. So she found herself a man.’

  ‘A man.’ He swallowed. Whether he thought of himself as a boy or a man, she didn’t know. So she went on, leaning to look up into his face.

  ‘Who was she flying to Sicily with that afternoon?’

  ‘Sicily?’ said Jackson slowly. ‘Someone was going to Sicily, I remember that –’

  ‘I found the overnight bag,’ said Iris. ‘It had her ticket in it. She was supposed to be coming back Friday evening, only she never got the flight.’

  ‘Sicily,’ said Jackson again, ‘I heard – Antonella – ’

  Iris barged on. ‘And who could have got into our flat, looking for that overnight bag, anything that would link her to him? Who tried to sabotage Ronnie’s computer? Who knew I wouldn’t be there Friday night? Who could hav
e got past old eagle-eyed Badigliani? Because you certainly didn’t, when you left at three o’clock this morning.’

  Jackson looked down at his feet, murmured something.

  ‘What?’ said Iris, impatiently.

  ‘You could have let me stay,’ he said, and when he looked up at her there was an almost wounded look on his face. She bit back what she wanted to say to him. It could wait.

  ‘So who?’ said Iris. In her pocket her phone shrilled; it was Sandro Cellini.

  ‘It was your Massi,’ Sandro said, before she could even speak. ‘Your teacher; she was having an affair with your Director. Paolo Massi’s name was on the outward-bound flight, he didn’t show; and he cancelled the return, the same day, Tuesday. But he would have been on the Friday evening flight.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Iris, ‘I’d worked it out,’ realizing he might not believe her, talking to Sandro but looking at Jackson. ‘Can I call you back?’ She clicked the phone shut.

  ‘You know how I know it wasn’t you?’ she said to Jackson, softly. A couple of months ago, a couple of days, she’d have had to endure the furious blush, to fight back tears, but her face felt as cool as marble.

  ‘I thought it might be you, because you wouldn’t tell me what you were doing Tuesday afternoon. And you were so weird yesterday, so angry. Only I know now.’

  ‘You do?’ said Jackson, and it was his turn to feel the brick-red burn rise up his cheeks.

  Go on, thought Iris, triumphant and miserable at the same time. Shame on you. ‘I talked to Sophia,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Jackson dully, and in that moment Iris lost the taste for it.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, and it really didn’t. Ronnie was what mattered; disentangling this whole mess was what mattered.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘Do you know? Have you worked it out?’

  Jackson spoke carefully, his flush disappearing as quickly as it had come. ‘Massi was planning a trip to Sicily last week, because I overheard him telling Antonella,’ he said. ‘He told her he needed to go and see a picture dealer.’