Corti nods. “Of course.”
“Di Stasi’s wife,” he says. “I think she may be hiding something. Nothing incriminating, of course,” he adds smoothly. “I just want to help her if I can.”
“Ever the knight in shining armour,” says Corti.
The coffee arrives. Corti stirs three packets of sugar into it, then downs it in a gulp.
“Are you in a hurry for this information?”
“I’m always in a hurry for information,” Martin says.
“It won’t be easy,” Corti says.
Martin calls the waiter over and pays the bill. “How is your wife, by the way?” he says as Corti fastens the middle button of his jacket. His shirt is white, his tie a slightly darker grey than his suit. As ever, Martin feels shabby and defensive about his own clothes, thrown on this morning, crumpled from the wash. Corti glances at Martin with distaste.
“Thank you for asking,” he says. “She’s well.” He tugs at his cuffs, plays with the cufflinks for a moment. They’re large and shiny, gold with some sort of crimson stone in the middle. “I’ll tell her you asked after her.”
“There’s no need to do that,” says Martin. He stands up, shaping the brim of his hat before holding his hand out. “As soon as you can manage it, then? And Di Stasi’s too, if you get the chance. No need to put yourself out, of course. Tomorrow will do.”
Corti nods, then touches Martin’s hand with the tips of his fingers. “We understand each other, Frame. We have always done, I think?”
“Oh yes,” says Martin. He has a sudden picture of Corti’s wife being bundled into a taxi, her coat half off, crying her eyes out. That was more than thirty years ago now. Still, a favour remains a favour. Martin is still owed something.
They’re leaving the table when Corti turns. “It’s a funny set up altogether,” he says. “This murder.”
“Is that what they’re saying at the ministry?”
“And not only at the ministry.” Corti shakes his head.
“Any theories?”
“None that I know of. Certainly none that I’m prepared to talk about. But I think you may be barking up the wrong tree with the widow. I hope so, for her sake. The last thing she needs is to be bothered by this sort of thing. Infidelity is such a squalid business.”
Martin’s climbing the stairs to his flat when he remembers a call he received this morning, from someone called Martha Weinberg. He knows the woman, though not well. She’s an American, New Yorker, been here for years. She used to be an actress, as far as Martin recalls, came over with the first tour of Hair, or claims she did. Bit of an ex-hippy, dabbled in avant-garde film, fringe activist, ban the bomb, women’s stuff. These days she’d say she was a journalist, but Martin would dispute that, despite the magazine she claims to own. She chatted for a while about the situation in Iraq, the anti-war demonstration organized for Saturday, the state of the world; pleasantries that paved the way to the real purpose of her call: Helen. Weinberg has been trying to call her, she told him, ever since she heard about the shooting, but her phone is always turned off. Now why would you want to speak to Helen? Martin asked her. I didn’t know you knew each other. Weinberg hedged a little here, said Helen had agreed to help out with the Saturday demonstration, essential that people stand up and be counted, another Vietnam, and so on. Martin let her speak herself out, then waited until the silence was too much for her. And I need to talk to her about her husband, she said eventually. Her husband? Is there anyone in Rome you don’t know? he teased her. She laughed, a throaty laugh that almost endeared her to him. Just tell her to get in touch with me, she said. Tell her I need to tell her stuff she needs to know.
He lets himself into the flat and makes a pot of coffee, then drinks it from his unwashed morning cup, standing beside the sink, his free hand cradling the dull ache in his stomach. The last time he lived with someone else, his second wife, she trained him to sit at a table to eat and drink, but even then it struck him as time wasted. After she’d left him he’d returned to his old ways, relieved, his use of plates and cutlery reduced to a minimum once again. Sometimes he can get through the whole day on a rinsed cup and a fork.
He’d call Helen now to see how she is, but knows she’ll be unavailable. He’s tried a dozen times already today, only to find her mobile turned off and the land line permanently engaged. He can’t blame her, but he wishes she’d call him, give him the chance to help a little. Yesterday afternoon at the agency, she seemed stunned with grief, incapacitated by it. He could have done more then, he knows that, the image of Helen in Giacomo Mura’s arms continuing to rankle. Still, there is more than one way to lend a hand. He thinks of Corti, thinks of the evening he’d rescued the man’s wife from the flat of her lover, hanging by his neck from the light flex in the bathroom. He’d helped Corti by clearing up the mess, speaking to people he knew at the British embassy, where the man had worked, smoothing things over until there was no more risk of embarrassment, or damage to Corti’s career, which hadn’t, after all, been quite as triumphant as he’d hoped. And now he will help Helen.
He walks through his shabby, unlit flat to the room he calls his office and searches through a drawer full of business cards until he finds what he’s looking for.
4
Helen watches Giacomo and Yvonne climb the stairs. Yvonne is two steps behind her husband, dragging her feet, while Giacomo bounds ahead, panting with the effort. This morning, he’s dressed in a light wool suit and freshly pressed linen shirt, open at the collar, expensive, tailor made. She thinks of the first time she saw him: his T-shirt and combat trousers, filthy, worn to shreds, and of how he simply moved in with them. He has always treated my home as though it were his. He has always treated me as though I belong to him in some way. And I’ve never discouraged him. She wishes he had come alone.
“Can’t move for journalists out there,” Giacomo says.
Helen nods. She holds him by the jacket cuffs as though afraid to take his hands in hers, then lets him go.
“They want to know if you’re ready to come out to speak to them.” Yvonne offers her cheeks to Helen to be kissed, her lips caught in a little moue.
“I’ll never be ready to speak to them. They’ve been buzzing to be let in all morning. I wish to God they’d all go home and leave me out of all this.” Her words are angry, but what she most feels is weariness. She’d like to sleep, but can’t. Whenever she closes her eyes, she sees Federico. She must have fallen asleep at one point, because she actually did see him, standing in front of her and asking her what she was waiting for, and she woke herself by crying out that she didn’t know what she was supposed to do.
Giacomo spots the trace of blood on her wrist and winces with concern, but Helen shakes her head. “It’s nothing.” She grimaces. “I’ve been playing with knives.”
“Giacomo is exaggerating as usual. They are two very young people in jeans and pullovers.” Yvonne is amused. “Like identical twins. Perfectly innocent, sitting together on the doorstep, reading different novels by John Grisham, I think, in Italian. They wanted to know who I was and I told them. I had to spell my name for them, letter by letter, but I still don’t think they understood. Is that possible? That they are journalists and don’t know the English alphabet? It was really quite sweet. They must be… what do you call them? That funny word the Americans use? Yes, cub reporters. Like little baby animals.”
Ignoring Yvonne, Giacomo takes Helen’s hand and turns it to examine the cut, then lets it go. “You should be more careful.”
“I’m at my wit’s end,” Helen says, pulling away, also ignoring Yvonne. She picks up the laptop case and unzips it, her hands shaking. “Federico left this with his parents on Monday. Fausto brought it round earlier. He’d been round there talking to them about the conference. I thought he’d been at work all day.” She flips open the computer and turns it on. “I can’t believe he lied to me.”
“Where did he say he was?”
Helen doesn’t answer at once. �
��He didn’t,” she says eventually. “I suppose I didn’t ask.” She holds the laptop out to him with a sort of resignation. I’m using anger to protect myself, she thinks, but that isn’t true. She’s never felt so hurt.
“So, how do you feel this morning?” purrs Yvonne, slipping out of a pale blue linen coat, beneath it an artfully simple dress made from the same material, the lining of the coat a shimmering dark grey, almost black. She lets the coat fall to the sofa, touches Helen briefly on one arm as Helen waits for Giacomo to take the laptop from her, then moves away. “Would you like me to make you some coffee?” she asks, hands stroking the bracelets around her wrists, as if she has offered to roll up her sleeves and scrub a floor for the first time in her life.
“No. You can make some for yourself if you like,” says Helen, then realises how ungracious this sounds. She has no reason to be unpleasant to Yvonne, a woman she barely knows, she tells herself, although she knows how absurd this is; she has every reason. She would give anything for Yvonne not to be here, standing between Helen and Giacomo like an unwitting chaperone. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”
Giacomo takes the laptop from her as Yvonne drifts off towards the kitchen. He looks at her, quizzically.
“Non parla italiano,” he says, gesturing towards Yvonne with her head. “Non capisce niente. Possiamo parlare con tranquillità.”
Helen is shocked. “We can’t do that,” she says. “How awful.”
He shrugs. “So, what do you want me to do with this?” he says, holding the laptop in one hand and brandishing it up and down, like some unwanted creature that has attached itself to him and won’t let go.
Irritated, she takes the laptop back and sits down at the table. “I wanted you to open it for me. I wanted you to see what Federico has been doing. I’ve been sitting here looking at it all morning. I just can’t do it alone. I saw a doodle he’d made when I got back last night and I couldn’t bear it. I felt as if he were still alive for a moment. I kept waking up all night and remembering.” She looks at Giacomo, who has sat down opposite her, his hands on the table, an unlit cigarette between them. “I don’t know if I could face him if he was alive. If he walked in now and saw you here, and Yvonne in the kitchen, I don’t know what I’d say.”
“I’m not such a terrible shock, surely?” says Yvonne. She’s made a pot of coffee and found a tray to put it on, with cups Helen never uses.
“You’ve made coffee,” Helen says, unnecessarily. “Thank you.”
Giacomo has spun the laptop round to face him and opened it. “What do you expect to find here?” he says as they wait for it to boot up.
“I’ve no idea,” she says, and means it. What most frightens her is that she has no idea what Federico has been working on these past few weeks. How little she’s spoken to Federico these past few months, if not longer, years perhaps. They’ve lived in a silence she thought was companionable, but wonders now how true that is. He’s talked, she’s talked, but to what end? It’s not just the conference; she’s never been the wife he’d have liked in that sense, she knows that. She’s never regarded his work, or anyone’s work, as fundamental. This is another way in which she’s disappointed Giulia.
“Well, let’s see.” He clicks on Documents. The most recent is a Word file called Juggernaut. He clicks on that and finds a blank screen. “That’s odd,” he says. “Juggernaut mean anything to you?”
“Juggernaut? As in truck?”
“I don’t know. I can’t see Federico writing about trucks. Doesn’t it mean something else as well? Isn’t it that Indian thing that crushes everything in its way?” Pleased to have something to do, Giacomo takes off his jacket, closes the file, then opens it a second time. The same blank screen. “Juggernaut.” He whistles. “So, where is it?”
“There’s nothing there?”
“No,” he says. “Odd though, isn’t it? To delete the contents and leave the document. Why not delete the whole thing? I imagine it wouldn’t take much to retrieve what was in it either.” He clicks on paste, just in case, to see what might happen. Nothing. “As though they want us to find something.” He taps on the touchpad. “Of course, it might be someone who doesn’t know how to use a computer.” He glances at Yvonne. “It’s the kind of thing you might do,” he says.
Helen stands up, her arms crossed tightly across her chest. Her breathing is tight, she thinks she might faint.
Giacomo, with a snort, walks across to the door, beside which he has left a pile of the day’s newspapers. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen any of these?” he says to Helen, who shakes her head. “Responsibility’s been claimed by something that calls itself Nucleo Comunisti Armati, apparently. Never heard of them.”
He throws the newspapers onto the table in front of the sofa, just as Federico did when he came in from work, for Helen to flick through while he cooked and talked. These gestures, which hurt so much, which repeat themselves, thinks Helen, of their own accord; they have no meaning after all. It is all repetition. She sits down, suddenly unsteady.
“Apparently they were involved in the Porcu killing,” Giacomo is saying. “They claim to be the heirs of the Red Brigades, exactly what you’d expect them to say. I tried to read their statement in the car, the same old jargon-ridden nonsense that’s always churned out on these occasions. God knows what good anyone ever thought it would do, though, let’s face it, it used to convince us, didn’t it? Do you remember?”
Helen doesn’t answer; she’s barely listening. She wishes Yvonne would leave so that she could talk to Giacomo about something that matters. Oblivious, Giacomo sighs. “Class struggle. Hegemonic rule of global capitalism. Economic imperialism. It’s not that they’ve got it wrong, God knows. It’s just that it’s all so stale. The funny thing is they’ve used that typeface the old Olivettis used. What’s it called? Courier? For that touch of credibility, I imagine. If it looks like the kind of thing we banged out in Turin in the old days then it must be the kind of thing we banged out. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been written by the secret services, to throw people off.” He pauses and looks around the room, as if for support. “Oh well,” he says. “Life goes on.”
“I think you are shocking and cruel,” says Yvonne, “to talk like this. We have come here to comfort Helen, not to talk about these wicked people who have...” She pauses, turns her head to Helen. “I don’t know how you can bear to listen to him,” she says. “It is all politics.”
“So, no one knows who they are,” murmurs Helen, not answering Yvonne, not knowing what else to say. Until she can bring herself to believe in it, with her heart as well as her brain, Federico’s death has still not happened. So how can anyone be responsible? How can there be a murderer with no murder, no victim?
“In France we had ’68 and then, pouf, everything was back to normal,” says Yvonne.
“Don’t make yourself sound any sillier than you are,” Giacomo says, so quietly Helen wonders if she is the only one supposed to hear. Certainly, Yvonne gives no sign of having noticed, drifting around the room with her back arched and one hand stroking the nape of her neck, the image of petulant boredom. Helen watches Giacomo walk across and silently replace the receiver on the telephone, and she thinks, with a surge of infantile rebellion, Well, if it rings now, you can bloody well answer it yourself. It strikes her for a second that he’s been told to do this, and she wonders by whom for a moment – Is there no one she can trust? – before the idea is forgotten. Yvonne collapses with a weary sigh on the sofa and picks up a newspaper, the top one on the pile, and glances at the photograph on the front page.
“You look so sad,” she says, pursing her lips in what might be sympathy, holding the paper out for Helen to see. But Helen doesn’t need to take the paper from Yvonne to see the photograph, which occupies the top third of the page. Against her will, she glances at this brutal, stolen image of herself. Of course I look sad, she thinks. My husband has just been murdered. But now, as she takes in the image with greater
attention, she sees that Yvonne is wrong; the Helen in the picture doesn’t look sad so much as puzzled, as though she has been asked a question she can’t answer, or understand. She is standing beside a powerful blue car, one hand at her throat, her head turned from the camera, the image very slightly blurred. A man she doesn’t recognise is opening the door for her and as she steps over finally and takes the newspaper from Yvonne’s hand to examine the scene more closely, because her curiosity has got the better of her, she has a sense of estrangement from what she sees, as though the woman in the photograph is an actor who wears her clothes and has learnt her mannerisms, who moves as she does because she has been told to do so; she imagines for a moment that this is not her in the picture, but someone standing in. She drops the paper to the floor and picks up another and sees the same woman there, and what she feels is no longer shock, or violation, but a sort of envy she can’t understand, as though this woman, who looks so like her, despite her bewilderment, possesses some certainty she doesn’t. No, not certainty; its opposite perhaps – some leeway, some possibility that things could still be set right. The photograph was taken before she had seen Federico’s body, she’s sure of that, when there was still some chance, however faint, that a mistake had been made. What she would like to do now is to sit with these papers and these photographs and make some attempt to understand what has happened and what, even more, is expected of her, but she needs to be alone to do this. The nausea she has kept at bay all morning begins to rise. How odd that grief should affect the stomach, she hasn’t expected this. But she hasn’t expected grief.
“Aren’t you going to tell Helen that you met with the magistrate this morning?” says Yvonne.
Giacomo glances furiously at Yvonne, who gives him a little serves-you-right smirk before straightening her skirt, then at Helen, who is staring at him, open-mouthed, in what looks like a state of shock. Before anyone can speak, the landline rings. Helen shrinks back, then raises her hands as if in self-defence. Giacomo puts his hand on the receiver, avoiding her eyes. “No,” she cries, her voice breaking, but he has already picked it up. He turns his back on both Helen and Yvonne to answer, relieved to have something that might distract them, or distract Helen, and is told to wait, something he hates. Normally he would put the phone down, but today he does what he’s been told to do.
The View From the Tower Page 9
