‘We need to throw the media off this trail. You need to think of something else that we found to keep them at bay. If people find out what really happened, then –’
Marco interrupts me mid-sentence. ‘After your accident, I sent another email saying the announcement was delayed due to unforeseen circumstances. I was trying to buy us some time to think this through. I was hoping your memory would have returned by now.’
‘Even if my memory came back, what light could it shed if you say we put it in the safe together before leaving the lab?’
‘You might remember something. Anything. Maybe you saw someone, maybe you thought you were being watched. I don’t know, Sarah.’ His voice rises. ‘If I knew the answers, we wouldn’t be in this goddamned situation.’
He’s just stressed, I tell myself, because it feels like his anger is directed at me. ‘I can’t help that I don’t remember,’ I say softly.
He comes over to my bed now and I can see he is trying to keep his emotions in check. ‘I know, tesora,’ he says, placing his hand on my leg. ‘It’s not your fault. I just can’t believe this is happening.’
I want to get off this hospital bed and go home to retrace my steps … I just don’t know what they were.
‘Look, hopefully you’ve thrown the media off the scent with that second email, so we have time to figure this out before the authorities get involved.’
Marco closes his eyes and sighs. Then he goes to his briefcase and pulls out a newspaper.
‘That’s the thing, Sarah,’ he says handing the paper to me. ‘It’s already too late.’
I hold the newspaper in my hand and read the headline: MARCO MORETTI’S WIFE IN NEAR-DEATH CAR ACCIDENT AFTER MAKING UNDISCLOSED FIND. I read the article with only one eye, compounding my headache.
As I read, I have a feeling of displacement, as if the world knows something about me that I don’t. Only moments ago, I was told that I discovered the necklace. Then that it was stolen. And now, I’ve just read all about it in the newspaper, meaning readers knew what happened to me before I did. Having no memory of it makes me feel vulnerable. I am completely reliant on others for the truth. So, how do I know if I did the things I’m told I did?
I keep picturing myself lying with my head on the steering wheel, unconscious, bleeding. The thought terrifies me. A sense of powerlessness unnerves me to my core, made worse by the fact that I remember nothing of it but have the injuries to prove it happened.
‘This is bad, Marco.’
‘I know. That’s why we need to get the necklace back. You have to regain your memory.’
‘Getting my memory back is not going to make the necklace magically reappear.’
‘It might,’ he says, gazing out the window again.
‘Marco, what are you talking about?’
He pats down the sweat that’s gathered at the back of his neck. ‘Here’s the thing, Sarah: the police said your accident occurred at two am, but we left the lab in separate cars at midnight, so there are two hours of your time that aren’t accounted for.’
I feel my cheeks grow warm. I sit up awkwardly using only one arm. ‘God, Marco, what are you insinuating? That I had something to do with its disappearance?’
He won’t look me in the eye. ‘No, of course not,’ he says, but his tone is wholly unconvincing. ‘It’s just that, I mean, what were you doing in those two hours?’
I feel a hot rage come over me, made worse by the fact that I am practically chained to the hospital bed – and, with no memory, I can’t even defend myself. ‘Great question, Marco,’ I snap. ‘I can’t remember a single thing from the night I was almost killed and you’re asking me what I was doing in those two hours, like I’ll suddenly remember?’ I stare him dead in the eyes. ‘Seriously, you think I could have stolen the necklace? Is that what you are accusing me – your wife of twenty-two years – of doing?’
‘Of course not,’ he says, and attempts to run his hand over my hair to placate me, but I push it away.
‘I thought maybe, for whatever reason, you decided to hide it somewhere else safe in that time even though we agreed not to,’ he says.
‘I would have called you. I would have told you what I did.’
‘I know, that’s why –’ He sighs mid-sentence and pauses. And then his body goes still. ‘It’s not you I’m accusing, Sarah. But what if you were followed?’ His voice gets softer, guarded. ‘What if you had a confrontation with someone and you don’t remember it? What if they used a weapon to force you back to the lab and make you open the safe to retrieve the necklace? And then to avoid an investigation, they staged your car accident as a way of explaining your injuries.’
The anger rushes away and is replaced by fear so raw it makes my whole body go cold. Suddenly my accident doesn’t seem like one.
I replay the facts in my mind: We make the discovery of a lifetime, find a jewel that’s worth hundreds of millions of euros and then I crash on the way home. The timing seems far too coincidental. I swallow; my mouth begins to feel dry and the throbbing in my head peaks. I’m terrified. I picture men holding a gun to my head and pushing me inside the lab, bending my arm back until my wrist breaks, forcing me to open the safe. I imagine them hitting me until my ribs fracture and finally a blow to the head knocks me unconscious.
My body begins to tremble as I consider what Marco is suggesting. What if he’s right? What if my injuries aren’t from a car accident at all?
MARCO
Sarah was finally coming home from the hospital. I was told that two detectives would drop by in the afternoon to formally interview her. Thanks to the newspaper article and the others that followed, they were now investigating more than just the car accident. We were going to have to tell them the truth about finding the necklace; whether they would believe that it was stolen was another thing. They would want to know why I didn’t disclose the discovery to the police before. The omission made me look guilty, and with Sofia playing on my conscience, I felt guilty.
If the police had been watching me since the accident, they would already have evidence of my young mistress. I cringed thinking of how my affair would affect Sarah and my children, and of course my career, if it were revealed. A niggling part of me toyed with the idea of pulling the officers aside and mentioning Sofia to them so they wouldn’t probe me in front of my wife. If the detectives were male, surely they’d understand. We all had our digressions, didn’t we?
I was five. There was a woman who came over to our apartment when my mother was out. She had long, black hair, and a tattoo of an eagle on her right shoulder blade. She had small hands and she always wore short, tight tops that showed her bare stomach. When she visited, Papà would lock me in the tiny laundry; it was windowless, damp and barely a metre long. Sometimes she would bring things to keep me busy while I was trapped in there. Fruit. A chocolate bar. A tattered picture book. Second-hand pencils. I could hear the crunch of carpet under her feet as she wandered through the rooms, and her laughter that seemed out of place. She always seemed to be laughing. It smelled like mothballs in that laundry, and it was cold. I was scared in there. I didn’t like to be enclosed in small, tight spaces. At first, when he locked me in there, I used to cry and bang on the door. But then he’d smack me, so I had to learn to keep myself busy. I’d count the tiles on the floor. Or I’d follow a trail of ants to see where they had come from. Other times, I’d climb up beside the washing machine and open it, and then press the button to see the water whirl around in circles.
But once, I stretched up to the handle. I knew it would be locked but I tried to open it anyway. When it turned, I was so stunned that I almost closed myself back inside the laundry again. But curiosity got the better of me and I crept out as quietly as a mouse.
I heard moaning like someone was in pain and I tiptoed to the sounds, scared and shivering. I stood behind my parents’ bedroom door. I could hear my father grumbling. Concerned, I peeked through the open shaft of the door and saw my father with a cigarette spilling
out of his mouth, his hairy chest, his eyes wild like in the cartoons that gave me nightmares. And then I saw her, her black hair matted to her back, the eagle tattoo on her shoulder flapping its wings as if it were alive.
At first I thought she was crying, she had her neck arched backwards and her head was swaying back and forth; she was rocking. I could see the white flesh of her bottom and I stood there, startled.
‘Where’s Mamma?’ I cried, confused. In seconds, my father had me by the neck. Strong hands. Breath of tobacco and grappa. He dragged me out the room and locked me back in the laundry, this time with the lights off.
I shuddered at the memory. I could still feel the dampness, smell the urine drying on my pants, breathe in the mustiness in the air. I remembered how my tears tasted, how I learned to like the dark, to crave it, and how eventually the laundry came to be the only place I felt safe.
Even at the age of five, I knew that whatever he was doing with that woman was wrong. So why now, as an adult, was the boundary between right and wrong so blurred?
I arrived at Sarah’s hospital room to find her sitting up on the bed, staring out the window deep in thought. The light caught her eyes, making them look almost translucent. And with her blazing long red hair and meditative expression, she looked ethereal. It cut me deep in my chest to think of how I had deceived her. So, right then and there, I made a vow to myself that I would end things with Sofia. That I would be a good husband. That I would make up for my wrongdoings. That I would be nothing like my father.
I stood behind her, put my hands on her shoulders and leant down to kiss her cheek. She reached her hand up to meet mine as she continued to stare serenely out the window. ‘Let’s get you out of this place,’ I said. ‘The kids are waiting for you at home.’
Her left eye was still bruised but the swelling was going down. A fresh bandage had been applied to her head; it was less confronting without the dark red stain of blood. She looked thinner, fragile, not the strong wife I was used to seeing instructing teams in the trenches.
‘I am so ready to go home,’ she said and exhaled.
I helped her sit up slowly. ‘I brought a suitcase for your things.’
‘Thank you.’ She began to pack up and then flinched in agony, clutching her ribs.
‘Let me do it, tesora. You rest.’
I placed her clothes and books in the case as Sarah watched on. My wife was unaccustomed to sitting still so she tapped her foot restlessly on the floor.
‘This whole experience has been so surreal. I still can’t wrap my head around what’s happened,’ she said as I moved about the small room, checking all the drawers and cupboards were empty.
‘I’m sure if you could remember everything, you wouldn’t feel so disorientated. Maybe when you’re back home in your familiar environment and away from the stress of being here, it might relax your mind enough to reclaim those memories.’
Sarah sighed. ‘You know what the doctors said about the chances of my memory returning. I think we both need to accept that tracking down the necklace is going to take a lot more than getting my memory back.’
I said nothing because I refused to believe the doctors were right. My wife was too intelligent, with an uncanny recall. The memories were there, I was sure of it. She just needed to find a way to access them.
Sarah and I thanked the nurses for their care as we left the ward. I held her at the elbow for support as she walked frailly towards the lift. ‘The police want to speak to us this afternoon,’ I told her as we got out on the ground level and headed towards the exit doors.
Before she had a chance to reply, we were ambushed by journalists thrusting microphones in our faces. A female reporter yelled out in English, ‘Is it true that you found the most precious jewel in the world and now it’s missing?’
My cheeks felt warm as I squinted through the blaze of cameras. I must have looked like a deer in headlights. I tried to push past them but they ran beside us and kept shouting questions.
‘Signora Moretti, do you believe that someone tried to kill you?’ a male reporter asked. I could feel Sarah slink beside me. She could only move at a slow place so I tried to shield her by pulling her closer, careful not to touch her broken ribs. She covered her face with her good hand.
I stopped for a moment, knowing this chase would follow us all the way to the car, and who knew if there would be more camped outside our home. ‘My wife has been in a serious car accident,’ I said in the most authoritative voice I could muster. ‘We would appreciate if you respect our privacy while she recovers.’
But my statement did nothing to appease them. Instead, it made them pounce like a pack of wolves attacking prey. They yelled a barrage of questions in Italian and English, each reporter speaking over the top of the next.
‘Where is the necklace now?’
‘Is it true, Signora Moretti, that you can’t remember anything about your accident?’
‘Has there been foul play?’
Before this whole saga, I would have done anything for this sort of media interest. Now, I didn’t want a bar of it. But it was too late. I’d created a monster.
I held Sarah close and pushed through the throng of hungry journalists. I quickly unlocked the car doors and helped my wife into the passenger seat. She winced in pain, her good hand cupping her ribs. I closed the door and then I turned once more to the media before getting inside. ‘We will make a formal statement about the necklace in the coming days.’
With that, I jumped into the car and sped away from the kerb, feeling the heat of their focused camera lenses like a burn to the back of my neck.
I was finally getting the fame I so desperately wanted. But for all the wrong reasons.
MARCO
I knew the investigators didn’t like me. Maybe it was because I had a carefully thought-out answer for every question they posed. There was a saying in Italian: A chi fa del male, non mancano mai le scuse. He who does evil, is never short an excuse. Or maybe, given that I was a well-known television presenter, it was a case of what my wife said they called ‘tall poppy syndrome’ in Australia – the desire to see someone successful fall from grace.
Either way, I could tell from their first question that red flags had already been raised.
‘Signor and Signora Moretti, we don’t want to take up too much of your time, so we’re just going to get straight to it. We have reason to believe that you found the San Gennaro necklace and failed to report it. Is that correct?’
I was surprised by their abruptness. ‘Yes, that’s correct,’ I said simply. I wasn’t going to elaborate unless they asked me to.
‘Why didn’t you mention the discovery of the necklace on the night of your wife’s accident?’ the older investigator, Captain Gammino, asked.
Sarah and I were sitting in our lounge room on a sofa, across from the two investigators from a division of the carabinieri responsible for protecting cultural heritage. Sarah had offered them an Australian blend of coffee, which they took gratefully but then left to go cold on the coaster.
‘I was in shock,’ I told them. ‘I’d just been told my wife had been in a serious car accident. The last thing on my mind was work. I just wanted to get to the hospital to be by her side.’ Of course, I couldn’t tell them the truth – that I deliberately didn’t mention it because I still had my heart set on making my big media announcement the next morning.
Captain Gammino held me with a steely gaze and then wrote something on his notepad. He was overweight with a receding hairline and had an intimidating air about him that made me think of Tony from The Sopranos. The younger one, First Marshal Dominici, was clean-shaven and well built, and struck me as someone who played by the rules. I got the sense that, as partners, Gammino was the one who enjoyed making the suspects squirm while Dominici observed their body language, looking for signs of guilt – the twitch of a jaw, the flare of nostrils, sweat on the upper lip, stiffening shoulders.
‘Okay, how we about we start at the beginning? Signo
ra Moretti, why don’t you talk us through what you remember from the night of the accident,’ Dominici said.
‘Please call me Sarah,’ she told them. ‘I don’t remember anything from that night. The doctors say I have post-traumatic retrograde amnesia.’
Dominici flipped open his notepad. ‘So, what’s the last thing you do remember?’
‘I can recall with clarity getting coffee at my favourite cafe, Giacosa, and the next thing I remember is waking up in hospital.’
‘Do you have any memories of working that night? Anything at all?’
She sighed and squeezed my hand. ‘Nothing. That space of time in my mind is now just a black hole.’
‘Sarah was on the excavation site alone when she called and asked me to come straight to the lab,’ I said to fill in her blanks. I proceeded to tell them what happened that night up until the point when we left the lab in separate cars.
‘Sarah, do you recall any of the events your husband has just mentioned?’
She shook her head and I saw the detectives make eye contact for a split second before both writing on their notepads.
‘Do you have any evidence of finding the necklace?’
I sat in silence for a moment, anxiety building, and then I clicked. ‘Yes, we do,’ I said, suddenly feeling reenergised. ‘We took photos on Sarah’s cell. Where’s your phone, sweetheart?’
Sarah, looking confused – clearly she couldn’t understand why I hadn’t told her of the photos before now – indicated to the table and I rushed over to get it. The photo data would prove the time we found the necklace and left the lab. The screen had a crack in it from the crash. Sarah squeezed my arm in excitement. When I got to her photos, I froze in confusion. There was not a single photo of the necklace. I scrolled through her albums but there was no trace of the images we’d taken that night.
The Perfect Couple Page 10
