“Sit down,” he says, his voice unnaturally quiet. He leads her to one of the low soft chairs arranged along the wall, where visitors wait to be met. She sits down, shaken, not curious at all, because she already knows. He picks up the phone, his back to her, and she can’t hear what he is saying although she hears her own name quite distinctly, not once but twice. She doesn’t know how she knows, but she does; her blood knows.
Federico is dead.
ROME, Italy (CNN) – Shortly before 9:30am today, Federico Di Stasi, a consultant at the Ministry of Employment, was assassinated in the centre of Rome. According to initial investigations, two or three men on motorcycles shot him dead in Via Rasella, less than one hundred metres from the Quirinale, the official residence of the President. The driver of the car, Massimo Monesi, 28, also died in the attack. A third man, the bodyguard, is expected to be released from hospital in a matter of days. The attack is believed to have been carried out by internal terrorists, although no organisation has claimed responsibility for the attack. There is believed to be no connection with the Republic Day celebrations tomorrow, nor with the official visit of US President George W. Bush, scheduled for Thursday.
Di Stasi was most recently responsible for controversial plans intended to dismantle the few remaining state-owned enterprises and place them on the open market. Despite government pressure, he is believed to have insisted on the need to protect those currently employed by these enterprises, most of which are concentrated in the south, by establishing a series of government-financed “buffers”. These have been fiercely contested by members of the government as “hand-outs”. Di Stasi has also spoken out recently against military intervention in Iraq.
“It has all the hallmarks of a warning,” Attorney General Lorenzo Gaeta told reporters in Via Rasella shortly after the murder. “Even the choice of site is significant. Via Rasella was the street in which partisans killed 33 German soldiers during the last war.” When asked if he saw a link between this assassination and the murder three years ago of Davide Porcu, Home Office adviser, Gaeta refused to comment.
Government spokesmen are already talking of a fresh outbreak of terrorism, accusing the so-called no-global movement, as well as unions and parties on the left, of bearing at least part of the responsibility for the murder because of the recent intensification of protests against the government’s economic policies.
Federico Di Stasi was born in Rome in 1952 to the journalist Fausto Di Stasi and life senator Giulia Paternò, partisan and among the founders in 1948 of the Italian Constitution. After studying in the United States and Britain, he was briefly involved in extra-parliamentary activities during the late 1970s. He began collaborating with the Ministry in 1982 under the first centre-left administration. He leaves a wife and no children.
4
As soon as the police have finished with her, Martin Frame comes into the room and slumps into a spindly gilded chair in front of Helen. He takes her hands in his and holds them for a moment without speaking. He isn’t sure what to expect, what to do; he’s hopeless at moments like this. The last time he spoke to Federico they had talked about his chances of coming through the reform process alive, and Federico had said you had to live each day as if you were eternal, which is a wonderful sentiment, of course, as Martin remarked at the time, but offers little actual protection against attack. That kind of talk, thought Martin then, is one of the many ways we ward off the nastier business of reality; Federico had been involved in government long enough to know that. But none of this seems to matter now.
Martin’s still shaken, shaken and appalled to have lost a friend like this, in a morning. God only knows how Helen must be feeling. She’s not the type to cry, but still, how hard it must be to hold oneself together. She looks up and attempts a smile, then shakes her head, as if to say, Who would have expected this? He sighs. If it hadn’t been Federico, he thinks, it would have been someone else, although he won’t be saying this to Helen. Why on earth should Helen be interested in someone else?
He looks down at their hands: Helen’s, lightly tanned and delicate, engulfed in his own, large nicotine-stained, like the paws of some beast, nails bitten down to the quick as they have been for the past fifty years. He’s scared of how fragile she must be, as though a simple gesture might crush her. He feels he should speak, say something helpful to her, but doesn’t want to seem banal, or uncaring, and can’t think of anything to say that isn’t one or the other, or both.
“Oh, Martin,” she says finally, breaking the silence, the words little more than a sigh.
He moves and the chair creaks beneath him. For an awful moment, he imagines it breaking beneath his weight. He sees himself struggling to his feet, the chair in splinters beneath him; how unbearable that would be, how close to farce. Abruptly, he lets her go.
“One of us should be at the desk,” she says, her forehead suddenly creased with worry.
“You needn’t think about work, my dear. The desk is the last thing you need to worry about. I’ll take care of all that.” He lets her go.
“I’ll be back,” she says, her face set, oddly determined. “Just as soon as all this is sorted out.” He wonders what she thinks she means by “this”. The specific business of the police and everything that will have to be done? Or the infinite business of Federico’s death?
“I know you will,” he says. “I rely on you. You know that.”
“I just can’t believe this has happened.” She stares at the ceiling; he watches her throat as she breathes. “I know it’s what everyone says, Martin, but it’s true. I never knew. People talk to me and I feel as though they’re talking about someone else. They asked me all these questions and I kept wanting to tell them I wasn’t sure, I couldn’t remember, I’d have to check with Federico.” Her gaze moves down towards him, as if to beseech him for an answer he doesn’t have.
“You have to give yourself a chance.”
“To do what?”
“To take this on board,” he says. He wishes he had found something better than this tired phrase, then makes it worse by adding: “You’ll need all your strength.”
She looks away again, this time at the window, its weighted gauze curtains like a shroud. “They told me I’d be needed later, at the hospital.” She pauses, then shudders, clutching her elbow with her hands as if to shield herself against the cold. “I suppose what they meant was the morgue.”
They are in one of the rooms reserved for interviews; a long table, a score or so of brittle ornate chairs like the ones they are sitting in, over- and under-decorated at the same time. Martin is rarely obliged to attend events in here; his work is at the English desk. The walls are a pallid institutional green, the row of windows framed in swathes of heavy rust-coloured velvet, held back by gilded cord that would take the skin off a sailor’s back. Outside, beyond the filtering veils of gauze, is the side wall of the President’s palace. A shelf of television screens on the wall behind Helen’s head flicker green and black as the stories roll in, but he doesn’t read them. He can imagine what they’re saying. Stories and comments on stories and the whole self-feeding business of news, to which he contributes daily as a jobbing journalist; and now the business is turning on Helen for nourishment, as she must know. She hasn’t looked round to see what’s being said, not while he’s been here anyway, and he can’t blame her for that. The longer she goes without witnessing Federico’s death reported, the easier it will be for her to pretend it hasn’t happened. But he can’t help wondering what she’s thinking; she seems so distant.
“Were they difficult?” he says.
“Who? The police?” She shakes her head. “On the contrary. They treated me with kid gloves.” She shudders again. “The last time I was questioned by the police they treated me like shit.”
“That must have been some time ago,” he says cautiously.
“I’m sorry, Martin.” She opens her bag, her manner distracted and fidgety, then snaps it shut. “No, they were fine. They just asked
me a lot of questions, that’s all.”
“What did they want to know?” he asks, on firmer ground now.
But she doesn’t seem to have heard. “You know what I’ve been thinking about?” she says. “Condole. The word, I mean. Is that how we say it in English? Only it sounds so strange when you say it out loud. Are you condoling me, Martin?”
“I’m trying to, my dear. Not very well, I’m afraid.”
“I’ve been here too long,” she says, and sighs. “I’m forgetting everything.”
Martin has known Helen since she first came to Rome, over twenty-five years ago. A call came through from reception one morning to say that a young woman wanted to speak to someone at the English desk. Send her up, said Martin. His latest intern, a newly-arrived English graduate who drank too much and fancied himself as a revolutionary, had walked out that morning after being ticked off about a piece he’d written. Perhaps she’ll be looking for a job, he thought, we could do with some fresh blood. When she came in, he was disappointed; she looked younger than he’d expected, and unconvinced, as though she didn’t expect much good to come from this. It didn’t take long for him to change his mind. She’d been teaching, she said, in Turin, but hated the work. She’d moved to Rome and wanted to write; she had some pieces she’d done with her and could leave them for him along with her CV. He asked her to try out the following day – he’d square it with management if she worked out, and if she didn’t, they’d pretend it hadn’t happened. How did that suit her? It made her smile, a smile that lit up her face; he remembered thinking, so it isn’t just a cliché, it actually happens. Smiles can light up faces. By the time she’d left he was infatuated. He stayed that way for almost two months, as she learnt the job and they shared the odd coffee break, not quite in love with her, but almost, toying with the idea of it as she toyed with her spoon and packet of sugar, before leaving it unopened. Until one evening she invited him round for dinner and introduced him to a serious, blond young man who might have been her brother, but was in fact her husband, the economist Federico Di Stasi, she’d said with unashamed pride, and Martin had shaken his hand and raised an eyebrow. Yes, Federico had said before anyone else could speak. My ill fame goes before me. I don’t think we say it like that, she’d said, and whisked Martin off into the small living room they had then, still filled with boxes and piles of books after what must have been months in the place. Federico will do the cooking, she said. He loves to cook.
“What was Federico doing?” Martin asks now.
“What do you mean?”
“Where it happened,” says Martin, unable to say where he was shot.
“He was buying some cheese,” she says. “For this evening.”
“I thought you normally did the shopping.”
“I do,” she says. Is she correcting him? It’s hard to tell. Perhaps she simply hasn’t realised, not fully. You can know something and not know it, Martin’s more than aware of that. Sometimes he thinks it’s the human condition.
“Cheese?” he says, prompting her. He’s on safer ground, somehow, with questions.
“Stilton. The shop he was going to imports it from a dairy near Leicester.” She looks at Martin, her face contorted by pain for the first time. “That’s the sort of thing Federico finds out. You know what he’s like. Everything has to be authentic.”
Martin reaches across and takes her hands again.
“We needed it for this evening.” With a sharp, unexpected gesture, she pulls her hands away. “I can’t do it,” she says, panic in her voice. “I can’t do dinner for people now. Not her, anyway.”
“Her?”
“Giacomo’s wife.”
“Giacomo?”
Helen nods. “You know him,” she says. “I’m sure you’ve met him, years ago. He’s an old friend of ours from Turin. He’s here for the conference.”
“You don’t mean Giacomo Mura?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Giacomo Mura’s here in Rome?”
“Yes.” She sighs, an odd resigned sigh, as if she’s just remembered something inconvenient that can’t be changed. “He adores Stilton, you see, he always has. That was the point.”
“Mura knew that Federico was getting Stilton in for this evening?”
She looks startled. “No,” she says. “It was meant to be a surprise.”
“So who did know?”
“The police asked me that as well,” she says.
They can’t have been ordinary policemen, thinks Martin, Federico was too near the centre of things for that; they must have been secret service, the branch that deals with terrorists. He saw them on their way out, two men and a young woman, attentive, polite, their jackets on, an almost embarrassing display of rectitude and concern, with the woman behaving in a hugging, sisterly fashion she must have been trained to adopt and Helen standing there, rigid in her arms like a mannequin being dressed. But for all their concern, they hadn’t seemed satisfied, Martin thought as he watched them pick up their papers and leave. Of course they asked her who else knew where Federico would be that morning. He’d like to know if she answered them, because she hasn’t answered him; but he doesn’t want to push. He’s never seen her this pale, almost grey beneath the early summer tan. He wonders now what else they must have asked her.
“Were they difficult?” he says again.
“No, I told you. They were very good with me. They just asked me about Federico, if he had any enemies. I didn’t know what to say. Of course he does. He travels with an armed guard, I said. I think I may have lost my temper with them a little. Isn’t that your job, I said, to know who his enemies are? And then they kept asking me about this morning, about what he normally did, what I normally did.” Her voice begins to tremble. “Oh God, Martin, it was awful.” She opens her bag again, closes it; he wonders what she’s looking for; a handkerchief, her mobile; or if this is some way of keeping busy, of distracting herself. “It was almost as though I couldn’t remember, as though everything had been wiped clean. I could see they weren’t happy.”
“That doesn’t matter,” he says, to comfort her. “What did you remember? Try and tell me. Perhaps it will help.”
She tells him about a cappuccino, the American library, walking through the market. “I saw that friend of yours,” she says at one point, “the bookseller. He’s bound to remember me,” and it sounds like a clumsy attempt to construct an alibi. She’s staring into his eyes as she speaks, as if she’s trying to convince him. In the end, her voice falters. “I just wandered round,” she says. “Window-shopping, I suppose. Looking at people.”
“Your phone was turned off?” he says.
“Yes,” she says, then corrects herself. “Well, not all the time.” She looks anxious. “They can check that sort of thing, can’t they?”
“When did Mura arrive?”
“Giacomo?” She rubs her eyes with her fingers. “I don’t know. Today, I think.”
He moves in his chair, cautious, feeling it give beneath his thighs. He can’t understand why she’s lying. He hopes that, whatever her reasons might be, she made a better job of it with the police. He decides to try one more time. But before he can ask her anything else, her face has puckered up like a slapped child’s and she’s fighting back tears.
“He didn’t die straight away, Martin,” she says. “He was still alive when they took him to hospital. If I’d had my mobile turned on, I might have been able to get there in time. He was conscious, they said, he wanted to know where I was.” Martin has found a clean handkerchief in his pocket and is holding it out to her, but she’s reached across the table to a box of tissues encased in the same dark velvet as the curtains, which are not so much rust-coloured, it occurs to Martin now, as the dark and powdery hue of the dried blood gardeners use on their roses. She pulls a tissue out. She wipes her eyes, then blows her nose with surprising vigour. “I’ll never forgive myself,” she says.
Before he can comfort her, she glances at the clock on the wall. He follo
ws her eyes. A quarter to three. Siesta time for some, he thinks, but the police or their assistants will be talking to the people in the bar, her neighbours, the bookseller, perhaps, the library staff; checking the times they gave against her account. A reconstruction of her morning, an ordinary morning, a normal morning, perfect in every detail. A morning that led her, step by step, to a place in which Federico is dead and nothing will be normal any more. That must be what she’s thinking. When she closes her eyes again and leans her head back into the emptiness behind her, Martin wonders where she really was this morning and why she is lying. He would do anything he could to help, if she will only let him, because what she needs, at this moment, matters more to him that the truth. You foolish child, he thinks, anxious for her but also hurt that she should feel he can’t be told.
“I didn’t realise it was this late,” she says.
“You must be hungry.”
“Not at all.” She covers her mouth with her hand. “I’d be sick if I tried to eat anything.”
“Still, something to settle your stomach? A sandwich, perhaps? I could have one sent up.”
She shakes her head. “Thank you, Martin. I’m fine. But you go and get something to eat. I’ll be all right here for a little while.”
“I’ll leave you then? You want me to go?” Is this what she means? She’s trying to get rid of him?
“Yes. Leave me alone for a moment.”
“You’re sure that’s what you want? I can wait outside if you like. I don’t want to leave you like this, Helen.”
“No, please,” she says, almost sharply. “Just for half an hour.”
The View From the Tower Page 2
