“Hello,” she says.
He looks up and smiles. “I called you earlier.”
“I didn’t know it was you. I’m sorry. I’d have answered if I’d known.”
“Well, you’re here now.” He stands up, shaking his trousers loose in a way that reminds her of Federico, and reaches behind him.
“I’ve been taken off the case. Too many personal ties, apparently. So it took a little while for me to lay my hands on it,” he says, as he holds out Federico’s briefcase.
EPILOGUE
Abruzzo, Monday, 7 June 2004
The first car to arrive is Helen’s. She’s chosen to drive because she likes the concentration it involves, and the distraction it offers. She left the motorway an hour ago, the last part of the journey is uphill, the roads getting narrower and more winding, and now she is parked in front of a small church. It isn’t as pretty as she expected, she’d hoped for bare stone and roses, but the over-elaborate façade of this one, with its pink stucco columns and crumbling beige plaster, is the worst sort of rustic baroque. Maybe it’s better this way, more appropriate. The last thing she needs to remember Federico is the easy sentiment of beauty. The service doesn’t start for over an hour but Helen wanted to get here early, she needs to talk to Don Giusini. She walks into the church.
He is standing near the altar, adjusting a strip of cloth, some flowers in a small pewter vase. She hasn’t seen him in his robes before.
“You’re early,” he says, with a smile, his hand held out. “I’m glad you found us.”
“I want you to use this,” she says, and gives him a sheet of paper. He glances at it, then reads it more carefully, frowning.
“Where does this come from?”
“As far as I know, it’s the last thing he wrote.”
“Are you sure?”
She nods. “I’m sure.”
After the coffin has been carried from the hearse and placed in the aisle, the church fills up rapidly. The people she knows well are in the first few rows and behind them all the others she has met maybe once or twice, colleagues, friends of Federico’s from school who must have been told about the service by one another, their families, a loosely-knit web of affection and sorrow that comforts and saddens her more than she has imagined possible. They spoke to her briefly outside, her hand in theirs, edging forward in a line that made her think for a moment of injections at school, as though she were there to minister to them. They told her things about Federico she had never known. People cried, and she cried too, an effortless crying that brought her relief. There were no journalists. People had taken her at her word.
After all these years in which they have hardly seen each other, Stefania was the worst. Oh my darling, how can you bear it? How will you manage? She was weak with howling, her eyes were bloodshot, her nostrils red. Helen calmed her as well as she could. You’ll be all right, she said and hadn’t realised how strange this was, that she should be comforting Stefania, until she’d spoken. Now she has Stefania sitting in the same row as her, with Giacomo between them, his arm around Stefania’s shoulder. The place to her right is empty. When she turns round to see who else might be there and notices Piero Cotugno, standing alone by the door, she is startled and pleased; she beckons to him to sit beside her. After a moment’s hesitation, he walks across and takes her hand. “Thank you so much,” she says in a low voice, and he lowers his head a little, out of respect. “I’m glad to be here,” he says.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she says. When he looks up, she stares into his eyes. He meets her gaze. “I’ve been thinking about you,” she whispers.
On the other side of the aisle, the pew remains empty until, minutes before the service is due to begin, Giulia and Fausto enter the church, unaccompanied, and take their places. Giulia, impeccable, is dressed in the neat black dress and jet beads she was wearing two days ago. Helen wonders if she has taken any of it off between then and now, if she has eaten or slept or washed, or spoken to Fausto, who has shaved and spruced himself up, but still has the same haunted, absent air. Helen wonders if she has thought about what she’s done. She looks across at them to acknowledge their arrival, but Giulia is staring straight ahead, towards the window above the altar, with an air of exaltation on her face, while Fausto barely raises his eyes from the floor.
The last people to arrive, with a clutter and the squeak of rubber on polished stone as the wheelchair is eased up the step, are Martin and Alina. Helen turns to see them, raises her hand. Alina clearly wants to stay by the door, but Helen beckons to them urgently to come closer and Martin says something in Alina’s ear as she bends towards him. Martin is wearing a dark silk dressing gown over pyjamas and slippers. “There’s room over here,” says Helen in a loud whisper, pointing to the opposite pew, where Giulia and Fausto are sitting. Giacomo catches her arm, shaking his head to warn her off, but she is insistent. She wants to see Giulia forced to move, to make room for Martin and Alina. She waves them on until Alina has positioned Martin’s wheelchair in the aisle and sat down beside him herself, beside Giulia, who edges away, expressionless. “I’m so glad you’ve been able to come,” she says to Martin, in a voice that is low but loud enough to be heard by others. “I didn’t expect you to make it.” She wants to see Giulia forced to recognise what she has done.
After the final reading, Don Giusini leaves the pulpit and walks towards them, until he is standing beside the coffin. He pauses. He seems to be waiting for a sign to start, thinks Helen, alert, wound up, only relaxed by the presence of Piero Cotugno beside her. Don Giusini reminds her suddenly of Giacomo, the way he was when she met him, and she is saddened by this, because that Giacomo is dead. What a mess we’ve made of things, she thinks, as the priest began to speak.
“Helen wanted friends here, no one but friends, so you all knew – and most of you, no doubt, loved – Federico,” the priest says, then pauses and smiles, opening his hands to them. “That makes it easier for me. I don’t need to tell you what you already know. You have your memories of Federico, and they’re what count, they’re what will last. But there may be some things you don’t know, things that happened to Federico in the last few months of his life and that changed him. Important things.” He pauses again, but this time he doesn’t smile. He glances at Helen, who nods for him to continue.
“Federico Di Stasi was dying. He had a tumour pressing on his brain, an inoperable tumour that may have affected his thoughts and his emotions. If he hadn’t been murdered he would have lived for no more than a few weeks, in a state of great pain and confusion. His death was a sort of release from that. It isn’t for us to know whether this was part of a greater plan, this release, or whether it was part of something belonging to this world, the material world in which Federico lived and served and wielded power. Because Federico was an important, powerful man, his actions were designed to change this world, to change it for the better. When he discovered that he was about to die, after the shock and the grief for self that anyone would feel at such a time, he saw his destiny as a source of power. He had an idea that would take his importance to new heights. He thought that with a single act he would be able to change the world, our world. It was a dreadful idea. But that didn’t matter. He had only weeks, maybe days, to live. He thought he could ride roughshod over the laws of the world, like a juggernaut, a god. He was beyond human punishment.”
He pauses again and looks at the people in the church, as if to ask each of them what they would do if they were about to die. He looks at Helen, whose lips are trembling, who is living with the force of what she has set in motion. He looks at Giacomo, who turns away and comforts Stefania, stroking her hair as she weeps into his shoulder, whispering into her ear. He looks at Fausto, who lowers his head and sighs, and wrings a damp, crumpled handkerchief between his hands. He looks at Giulia, who returns his gaze, unflinching, untouchable.
“It doesn’t matter now what that idea was. The night before he died, although of course he didn’t know that then, he didn�
��t know that he would die so soon, he wrote these words:
The worst thing that can happen to a just man is to realise, the moment before he dies, how much he’s hated by those for whom he has given his life. Is this what will happen to me, to realise this? Will I realise, when it’s too late, that I am hated? That what I have done, convinced that I am right, is wrong? Am I a just man? And if I’m not?
I know now that I can’t go through with what I’ve planned. I want no more blood on my hands, or on my conscience. How can I die as a just man if by my dying more hatred is created?
“These are the last words we have from him. They sound like words of renunciation – they are anything but that. In these few words, Federico takes on his full humanity, the power and the glory of it. Federico, in his way, preferred to die not as an important man, as a saviour or lord protector of the world, as a martyr inflamed and reduced to blindness by his belief, but as an ordinary man, a just man, going about his business. He was shot down on his way to work by a common murderer. He will be remembered by us for what he was. A good man cruelly taken from us.”
The silence in the church is broken by a guttural suppressed cry. All eyes turn to Giulia as she struggles to her feet, stumbling over Alina’s legs in her attempt to leave the pew. If Martin weren’t there, in his wheelchair, she’d have fallen to the floor of the aisle. But she lands across him, her breath forced out of her by his knees in her chest. Alina cries out and jumps from her seat as Martin bellows with pain. Helen has expected to find pleasure in this, her mother-in-law’s discomfort at this last and most futile understanding of her own son’s death. Yet what she feels isn’t, after all, pleasure, but an overwhelming sadness, even guilt, as the old woman fights to stand, her hair unwinding in a thin white coil. Alina holds Martin’s head to her chest. “You’ll be all right,” she murmurs as Helen stands, half-turned, hesitant, one hand across her mouth, the other on Piero’s shoulder. We’ve suffered enough, she thinks, the damage is done. I should have spared her this, if only for Federico. She stares towards the back of the church, taking the hand from her mouth to gesture towards the door. But no one notices her. Everyone’s eyes are on Giulia, who trips a second time, stumbles, regains her balance, then stumbles again, her stuttering, broken journey through the silent church towards the light seemingly without end. A tall girl Helen doesn’t recognise, who was casting shy glances at Giacomo before the service and is sitting in one of the pews beside the door, tries hopelessly to stifle her laughter as Giulia leaves the church.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Among the people who have helped me during the writing of this novel, I’d particularly like to thank my friend and agent, Isobel Dixon, for her unflagging efforts on my behalf, and my group of constant readers, Clarissa Botsford, Peter Douglas, Wayne Harper, Jane Lambert, Joanna Leyland, Sally MacLaren, Jane Stevenson and Phyllida White, for their patience, wisdom and generosity. I’d also like to thank Renata Crea, Sam Humphreys and Rob Redman for their valuable advice at different stages in the book’s development, and Emlyn Rees, my editor, for his enthusiasm and good sense. Finally, as always, Giuseppe Mallia was a resilient sounding board for ideas at every stage. I don’t know what I’d do without him.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Lambert was born in England and educated at Cambridge, but has lived in Italy for more than thirty years. Currently a university teacher, academic translator and freelance editor, he lives in Fondi, exactly halfway between Rome and Naples. His first novel, Little Monsters, was published in 2008, the same year as his collection of prize-winning stories, The Scent of Cinnamon and Other Stories, won an O. Henry prize. His next crime novel, Any Human Face, was described in The Telegraph by Jake Kerridge as ‘a slow-burning, beautifully written crime story that brings to life the Rome that tourists don’t see – luckily for them.’ The View From the Tower and Charles’s next novel, The Folding World, will continue this suspenseful exploration of Rome’s dark side. Also in 2014, Charles is publishing With a Zero at Its Heart, an autobiographical novel in 241 paragraphs, each paragraph composed of 120 words.
charleslambert.wordpress.com
twitter.com/charles_lambert
EXHIBIT A
An Angry Robot imprint
and a member of the Osprey Group
Lace Market House, PO Box 3985
54-56 High Pavement, New York
Nottingham NG1 1HW NY 10185-3985
UK USA
www.exhibitabooks.com
A is for Azzurri!
Copyright © Charles Lambert 2014
Charles Lambert asserts the moral right to be
identified as the author of this work.
Cover photograph: © XXX; design by Argh! Oxford.
All rights reserved.
Angry Robot is a registered trademark, and Exhibit A, the Exhibit A icon and
the Angry Robot icon a trademark of Angry Robot Ltd.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and
incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or
localities is entirely coincidental.
Ebook ISBN: 978 1 90922 368 4
UK Paperback: ISBN: 978 1 90922 366 0
US Trade Paperback: ISBN: 978 1 90922 367 7
WITH A ZERO AT ITS HEART
(SAMPLE)
Charles Lambert
For my mother, Olive Kate Florrie Lambert (neé Preece)
1916-2011
and my father, Vincent Lambert
1905-2006
CONTENTS
OBJECTS or GHOST BALLOONS
CLOTHES or UNRIPE STRAWBERRIES
SEX or HONEY AND WOOD
OBJECTS or GHOST BALLOONS
1
He has never seen a ship inside a bottle but the day he discovers their existence he knows that he wants one more than anything in the world. He is seven years old. He imagines men no bigger than his fingertip working at the building of the ship, singing as they nail long boards to the hull, and sew the rigid sailcloth panels for the mast, tall and straight as a tree, and coat the ship with burning tar to make sure it never sinks. He watches them gather on the deck. There is a bird above their heads. He imagines he is on a ship and there is glass all around him, as far as the eye can see.
2
He comes across the pendant in his great-aunt’s drawer. It is heavy, warm in his hand, the size of a just-fledged bird. At the heart of the pendant is the skeletal form of some insect, some winged insect, more than an inch long, longer than any insect he has ever seen, its flesh eaten out and engulfed by the same warm yellow that surrounds it. It is hollowed and sustained, its wings barely furled, it floats in a substance for which he has no name, which could be plastic but isn’t. There is a loop for a chain at the pendant’s top, but he will never wear it. It is amber. The insect has been trapped for a million years.
3
His father buys him a bicycle, but it is the wrong sort. The bicycle he wants has sweeping racing handlebars and no mudguards and is green and white. This one has small wheels and can fold into two. It is the colour of bottled damsons. He pushes his new bicycle into the road and rides away as hard and fast as he can, but it is not fast enough; it will never be fast enough to escape the shame of the thing that bears him. His eyes are blinded by tears. When he skids and scrapes the skin from his arms he is glad. He shows his father the blood. This is your blood, he thinks but dare not say.
4
He finds an owl pellet in the barn beside his house. It is round, the weight of a dove’s egg, and roughly made, as though pressed from earth or some other substance he can’t identify. He does what he’s read in his book, soaking and prising it apart. Some of it crumbles and is thrown away, but he’s left in the end with a tangle of tiny bones, as fine as rain, and puzzling, like a jigsaw without its box. One by one, he lays the bones out on his table until he finds at their heart a hollow skull, a jewel. That
night he sees an owl swoop from the bare eye of the barn towards his bedroom window.
5
His favourite aunt gives him a typewriter. The first thing he writes is a story about people who gather in a room above a shop to invoke the devil. When they hear the clatter of cloven hooves on the stairs the story ends, but the typewriter continues to tap out words, and then paragraphs, and then pages, until the floor is covered. He picks them up and places them in a box as fast as they come, and then a second box, and then a third. There is no end to it. I am nothing more than a channel, he whispers to himself, and the typewriter pauses for a moment and then, on a new sheet, types the word ‘possession’.
6
He’s looking for Christmas presents in an antique shop behind the station when he sees a small, black lacquered box with a hinged lid. On the lid is a row of Chinamen. Their robes are exquisitely traced in gold, their wise heads tiny ovals of ivory, inset, like split peas bleached to bone. They seem to be waiting to be received – supplicants before an invisible benefactor, some mandarin perhaps. Many years later, the box survives a fire, but the shine of its lacquer is destroyed and the fine gold lines that delineate the robes of the men are seared away. All that’s left is the row of heads, like ghost balloons, tethered down by invisible cords to the general darkness.
7
He reads his work at an international poetry festival. The local paper calls him a small, bearded man with one earring, which is two parts false and two parts true. At the party that evening, horribly drunk, coked-up, he pretends to adore the work of a Scottish poet whose shallow musings he despises, and ignores the two poets he most admires out of shyness and misplaced pride. These poets both die soon after, the first beneath a passing car, the second alone, choked by her own vomit. He feels accountable for their deaths. He takes the reading fee he has been given and uses it to buy a Bullworker – a contraption of wires and steel that will make him invincible.
The View From the Tower Page 28
