by Karen Swan
But she frowned as she caught sight of something on top of the other bin bags. Dropping her own by her feet, she reached in and pulled out a handbag. It looked brand-new and expensive. Powder-grey leather, it was a clutch style with stiff sides and a whip-stitch detail over the seams. Cesca was no fashion maven, but even she could tell from the bamboo-styled clasp that it was a Gucci (in her old chambers, a power bag from the holy trinity – Gucci, Prada or Céline – had been one of the defining characteristics of the more senior barristers, a way of communicating success when any other indicator such as a watch, suit or fortnightly Hersheson highlights were obscured by the wig and gown). She rubbed her thumb across the leather – it was supple and pliable; lambskin, too. It didn’t look like a fake; didn’t smell like one either, she thought, sniffing and savouring the rich aroma of leather. What on earth was it doing in here?
She realized why instantly.
Forgetting all about the large, leaking bin bag by her feet, she opened the handbag. Unlike her own, which contained a panoply of clutter, this was almost disappointing in its restraint – a hairbrush (with not a single hair on it), a Chanel Les Beiges compact, an Annick Goutal miniature perfume bottle, various business cards held in place by a silver money clip . . . But what was notable was what wasn’t there – neither a purse nor phone. The thief would have just grabbed the bag, taken what he needed and thrown this at the first possible opportunity; it would have been incriminating evidence if he’d been stopped.
Still, even without the value of cash or credit cards, this had to be a 1,000-euro bag, yet without any identifying documents, there was no way to return it to its owner. What next? she wondered. Would the police be able to do anything or was it finders keepers? Not that she’d ever really carry something like this herself. It looked as though it should belong to a woman who had a daily blow-dry, considered manicures as one of the pillars of civilization and wore diamonds at breakfast. Perhaps she should sell it? She needed the money and—
A sudden thought struck her – might there be a serial number inside the bag, much as you might find on a Rolex or a car, something that could be traced back to the owner? One of the partners at the chambers where she’d worked had owned a Hermès Birkin and that had had a small card with various authentication numbers on it. If there was something similar for this bag, she’d be able to return it: a solution that sat with her better than benefitting from someone else’s misfortune.
She unzipped the side pocket. It appeared empty from the outside but there was something in there. She pulled out a small, unopened blue envelope, the edges badly rubbed and scuffed, and on the front, in an elegant hand, was written a woman’s name: ‘Elena.’
Cesca bit her lip. Now was that the name of the woman the bag belonged to, or the person to whom she had written?
‘Buona notte, Cesca.’
She looked up to see Signora Dutti watering the profusion of flowerpots outside her door, giving the plants a drink now that the day’s heat no longer scorched the leaves. She was wearing the navy housecoat she always wore, her feet pushed into a pair of old Scholl sandals, a hairnet keeping her small curlers in place ready for tomorrow.
‘Buona notte, Signora,’ Cesca smiled, inadvertently waving the handbag at her. She saw it catch her landlady’s eye – the quality and implicit value evident even from a distance and to an elderly woman with 10/10 vision. ‘Oh.’ She skipped quickly over to her. ‘I just found this in the bin.’
Signora Dutti shook her head and tutted. ‘Thieves.’ She put down the watering can and took the bag as Cesca held it out to her, the smooth, pale leather in stark contrast to the landlady’s wrinkled, stippled skin.
‘Yes, unfortunately they’ve taken all the valuables inside – purse, phone . . . But the bag looks pretty expensive; someone must be missing it. And I found this.’ She held up the letter.
Signora Dutti’s expression changed as she saw the name on it.
‘I don’t suppose you have any idea who Elena might be?’ Cesca wrinkled her nose. ‘I mean, I realize that’s like—’ She stopped as she saw the look on the older woman’s face: satisfaction. ‘You do?’
Signora Dutti nodded and very slowly raised an arm, one finger outstretched, pointing towards the pale-blue palazzo on the opposite side of the square. Its shutters were painted in a pale-oatmeal colour and there had to be twenty-four windows – six on each of the four levels – just on this aspect alone. The palazzo didn’t actually front onto this little piazzetta, but rather its right side faced them here, the front door being situated on the Piazza Angelica around the corner. In the seven months that she’d lived there, Cesca had never seen anyone come or go from the building. The shutters – on this side at least – always remained shut.
‘She lives in there?’
Signora Dutti nodded, an inscrutable expression in her dark eyes. ‘She lives in there.’
Chapter Two
Behind her, Piazza Angelica was dimpled with light, rows upon rows of scooters lined up in military formations, the young Romans all clustering around the fountain in the centre as though it was a centre of gravity, pulling on them hard.
Cesca stood on the front steps of the palazzo and listened as the bell echoed deep inside the fortified building. Standing here in its shadow, her face only feet from its walls, it felt imposing and grand, far too ridiculously large to be a single private residence and not one of the many government buildings which usually occupied palaces of this scale. Who lived in a place like this these days? It could probably house a hundred families – or be converted into a school or a hospital. Something worthwhile, something useful.
She gripped the bag tighter in her hand, looking up at the very top edge of the five-metre door, where she spotted a security camera trained upon her. She looked away again, feeling exposed without her trademark panama on – she rarely went anywhere without it in this city’s heat. In her peripheral vision, she could see Signora Dutti standing by the fig tree in the corner of the square, wiping her hands on her housecoat as she watched. Her curiosity made Cesca feel even more nervous. What was so interesting about knocking on this door and returning a stolen handbag?
Ready to give up, she turned towards her elderly neighbour and gave a shrug as if to say ‘well, I tried’, when the door opened and she found herself face to face with a middle-aged man in black trousers and a short white housecoat, rather like a chef might wear. He was sporting tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses and no smile, his improbably smooth face set like a death mask.
‘Yes?’ He looked at Cesca enquiringly, his keen eyes catching on the small hole in her top, the scuff of her yellow canvas shoes and noting how she was still standing on the backs of them . . . He grew an inch. ‘It is late. What is it?’ he asked in an unfriendly tone when she didn’t reply absolutely immediately.
‘Yes. I’m sorry about that,’ she replied, realizing he was right – it must be after eleven by now; she needed to get to bed for she was due up again in just over five hours. ‘But I thought you’d want this back sooner rather than later.’ She held up the Gucci bag.
The man looked startled, then angry. In the next instant he had snatched the bag from her hands, making her gasp as he grabbed her by the elbow. ‘You have no idea what you have done. Are you one of them?’ He stepped out onto the top step, looking around the immediate vicinity of the steps with a fierce stare.
‘O-one of who?’ she stammered, taken aback and trying to wrest her arm free. Who was he looking for?
‘The gang.’ He looked back at her again, scrutinizing her with contempt and outright hostility, squeezing harder on her arm. ‘The gang who stole this bag. Because if you think we’d be so stupid as to pay you a reward for what you stole in the first place—’
‘What? No!’ Cesca surprised herself as much as him with the force of her tone as her indignation caught up with her shock. He thought she was the thief? He mistook her vintage shabby-chic look for genuine vagrancy? ‘How dare you! I live around the corner and found thi
s in my bin,’ she snapped, snatching her arm away. ‘My landlady Signora Dutti told me someone called Elena lives here and I came over to return it, that is all,’ she continued, furious now. ‘I was doing you a favour, but hey – don’t feel like you have to thank me. It was my pleasure!’ Bitterly, she turned away and stomped back down the steps.
She’d barely walked five paces when he called after her. ‘Wait!’
She turned to find him halfway down the steps, the bag – open – in his hands. ‘Please follow me.’
What? What for? Where was he going? If he thought she was going to go into that house after the way he’d just—
Hang on, where had he gone?
She ran back up the steps and stared into the dark cavity of the hall. The man was nowhere to be seen.
‘Hello?’ she called, and when no one answered, stepped over the threshold and called again. The corridor extended in a straight line for sixty metres to the left and right. Cesca felt the temperature drop a clean five degrees as the thick stone walls encircled her, the sticky city heat stopped at the door and allowed no further. She glanced behind her at the party still going on in the square, all the cool kids sitting on the edges of the fountain, faces uplit by the shimmering aquatic light, their nights at least still sticking to the script.
Not far off, she could hear the click of shoes moving quickly on the floor and she hurried after the sound, finding herself jogging down a long gallery as she just caught sight of the man before he turned a corner.
Her eyes took in the barest of details as she ran: there was far too much to process in those few seconds, but her ‘tour guide’ eyes clocked the ceiling frescoes, the baroque gildings and the staggering ranks of Renaissance artworks grouped on wires along the walls.
She reached a stone staircase around the corner and ran up it, two at a time, her breath beginning to come more heavily as the steps rose away from her, floor after floor, the light dim in spite of a magnificent chandelier hanging overhead. With her eyes down to keep from tripping, she didn’t see the tips of the shiny black shoes until she was almost upon them.
‘Oh!’ she gasped, launching backwards instead and feeling her balance desert her. A white-sleeved arm shot out and a hand caught her for the second time in five minutes – but this time with very different intent. The man’s face was impassive as she righted herself.
‘It’s this way.’
He had the handbag tucked under his arm as he walked and Cesca – although bewildered by the turn of events – had to suppress a smirk at the absurd image.
She followed him through yet more galleries, one after another, each a long, narrow salon with its shutters closed to the world in the square beyond. She saw paintings she knew were museum-standard – Caravaggio, Raphael, Velázquez, Titian; she trod over rugs spun from the finest silk. The colours of the walls were heavy and jewel-like: garnet red, peridot, malachite green . . . It wasn’t her style, nothing like, but she couldn’t help but be impressed. The palazzo was even more sumptuous inside and belied its muted, rather sober exterior.
If there was everything to see, there was nothing to hear – the raucous shouts and laughter of the piazza were as diminished by the fortress-like stone walls as the heat – but gradually her ears strained to pick up notes of music, drifting gently in snippets down the long corridors like fish on a river’s tide. Was that . . . was that La traviata?
The man – butler? Cesca supposed – stopped outside a pair of closed doors. He turned to look at her. ‘Wait here.’
Cesca blinked, feeling bemused as he disappeared through them, the bag still under his arm. A slice of falsetto escaped at full volume for a brief moment as the door was opened and then closed.
Cesca turned on the spot, head nodding in time to the faint music as she surveyed this ‘holding chamber’ – it was what could only be described as absinthe green, with a large portrait of a cardinal on one wall, some marble busts set upon pillars against another and a grouping of ruby velvet gilded chairs. It was too much, the colours oppressive and claustrophobic. Everything was so heavy. Where was the light? The lightness? Oh, for some cotton instead of these silks; some linen in place of the flocked velvet. She felt weighted down, as though the palazzo’s history was a physical presence that had to be borne.
She closed her eyes, continuing to nod in time to the music – only to realize it had stopped. She turned and found the doors were now open, the butler standing in the doorway watching her.
She stopped nodding.
‘The Principessa will see you now.’
... Principessa?
He stepped aside, clearly her cue to enter, and after a moment her feet obeyed. She walked in and stopped again. In contrast to the almost garish richness of the other salons, this room – three metres high and surely ten metres squared – was shocking in its simplicity. It was almost brutally minimal, with a pair of white linen sofas in the middle of the room, a shaggy deep-piled ivory sheepskin Berber rug like a landed cloud in the middle of the floor, and three utterly enormous canvases – of something abstract and modern with lots of black on them – on the walls. Everything was overscaled: not just the sofas, which could surely seat eight people each, but also the fireplace at two metres high, which was hewn from marble with an intricately carved trumeau that reached to the ceiling. In addition, a stunning collection of giant white hard corals – some self-enclosed and shaped like the heads of calla lilies, others flat like fans, their lace fretwork stretched as though on a loom – was set out on wooden stands and placed on display tables, beautifully punctuating the run of floor-to-ceiling windows on both sides of the room.
Cesca was aware that her mouth was hanging open but she couldn’t quite recover herself to close it yet. Walking into this, after the heady opulence of the rest of the palace, was like diving into the cool sea after a hot bath.
‘I feel exactly the same, my dear.’ The voice – American, as soft as a powder puff – made her turn and she saw a woman, who must previously have been standing by the far window, walking towards her. ‘I have to wear my sun-glasses just to walk through the gold gallery or I come out in hives, don’t I, Alberto?’
The butler nodded his acquiescence but Cesca ignored him: she couldn’t take her eyes off the woman coming towards her. Dressed in ivory silk pyjamas and an olive silk Japanese kimono, and relying on the support of a hand-carved cane, she was tiny and bird-like, with bobbed and coiffed grey hair, and a discreet pair of spectacles perched at the very end of her nose. Her bone structure was feather-light, as though she’d been handblown from glass, with high, appled cheekbones, an aquiline nose – with the faintest flare at the nostril, giving an impression of haughty displeasure – and a beautiful, still-tight jawline. But it was her eyes that entranced Cesca and kept her rooted to the spot – not blue, not green, they were a pure celadon colour, like the untouched waters of a Philippine lake.
She came barely to Cesca’s shoulder, the hems of her silk pyjamas silent as they trailed over the sumptuous rug. She held out her hand in such a fashion that Cesca wasn’t sure whether to shake or kiss it but, taking the conservative option and shaking it, she was surprised when the woman – princess! – covered Cesca’s hand with her other one. ‘How ever can I thank you?’ she asked warmly.
Cesca remembered to close her mouth. The bag. She meant the bag, she prompted herself. ‘It was nothing, really.’
The woman smiled. ‘It was not nothing. You have done something far greater than you can realize. I have been distraught all day. The contents of my bag were valuable beyond measure.’
Cesca frowned. Hadn’t the butler told her that the purse and any money in it were missing? ‘But I . . . I’m afraid the contents have been stolen. You know your money, credit cards—’
The woman smiled, tossing the caution away as though money itself had no value. ‘Come. Let’s sit. I want to know you better. Are you thirsty?’ And before Cesca could reply: ‘Alberto, bellinis.’
The quiet click of the door beh
ind her told Cesca he had gone as she and the princess walked the half mile – or so it felt – to the sofas.
‘Tell me your name,’ the princess said, sinking onto the cushions. With a sweeping hand motion, she gestured for Cesca to do the same.
‘Francesca Hackett,’ Cesca said, wondering why the room smelled so good. There were no flowers that she could see, no candles. ‘But everyone calls me Cesca, sometimes Chess.’
‘I am Viscontessa Elena dei Damiani Pignatelli della Mirandola, but everyone calls me Elena. Sometimes Laney.’ She laughed and the sound was every bit as surprising as this very room in this palazzo. A husky, low laugh, it sounded like it should have come from a woman twice her size, half her age, who feasted on cigars.
‘Viscontessa? But your butler said you were a princess.’
‘Did he?’ she sighed. ‘Oh, how I wish he would stop doing that. You must have got him on the back foot somehow; Alberto can become a little prickly if not handled correctly. He’s far grander than me. I much prefer Viscontessa. So much more friendly and approachable, don’t you think?’
Cesca’s eyebrows shot up. ‘So, you’re a princess and a viscountess?’
‘Double princess, actually, plus two dukedoms, five marquessates . . .’ She rolled her eyes dramatically. ‘Oh God, it goes on. Like a shopping list. I think there are eleven titles in all.’
Cesca realized she was staring at her and that her mouth was hanging open again – it was suddenly strikingly clear now why Signora Dutti had been so fascinated by the prospect of her coming into this building and meeting this woman. A Gucci bag was small fry in this arena. ‘But you’re American.’
‘That’s right. I married into the Roman aristocracy. Love makes you do crazy things, doesn’t it?’ Her voice was informal and inclusive.
