The Monster of Florence (40 page)

“Shall we go and have that coffee?”

“Oh, I’d really prefer to just sit here, I think. Do you mind? I spend my days stuck in a bar.”

“Of course, I hadn’t thought.”

“It’s so nice and warm in here with the sunshine. Look, that’s the cathedral—and what’s that great place over there on the right?”

“That will be Santa Croce. Perhaps, on your next visit to the clinic, you should think of staying on for a day.”

He was pretty sure that this woman had never done anything purely for pleasure in her life. She’d been dragging her anxiety and grief around with her ever since that night. It seemed like an act of cruelty to remind her of it now and he waited a moment or so as she gazed down at the city, hoping as he did so that she wouldn’t ask him to name some building that he didn’t know or didn’t recognize from up here.

In the end, she was the one who came back to the business in hand.

“I’m so sorry, you didn’t come to meet me so as to look at the view. I don’t know what you must think of me.”

“No, no, signora. Don’t worry.”

“But my train’s at one. You’d better start asking your questions.”

He couldn’t explain that it wasn’t that simple. He didn’t especially want to ask questions, since the facts were all in the report he’d read. What he wanted was contact. He hadn’t been at the scene of the crime, that was the trouble. That was the one moment when you understood everything. You could smell the people who’d been there, follow their movements by everything they’d touched, feel the atmosphere they’d left behind. There was
nothing of that in the report, and the only contact with it was this woman who’d dragged the weight of it through her life.

“You still hate him, I imagine.”

“Silvano? Yes, I still hate him. It’s a hatred that gets deeper and blacker with every day that passes. If they’d convicted him in eighty-eight, I’d have felt better. They dug up Margherita’s body, you know that, I suppose. But still it did no good. It had been almost thirty years.”

“It must have been upsetting for you, the exhumation.”

“It was upsetting for me that he got off. I’d have seen her dug up a dozen times if it had done any good. He’s an evil man, and as clever as the devil himself. Those eyes … I mean it. Marshal, he is diabolical. But I gave evidence against him and I’d do it again tomorrow, even at the risk of his murdering me. My mother was against it and she did everything she could to stop me. I’ll never understand it! Margherita was her daughter, for heaven’s sake. Of course, she was terrified of him.”

“That’s understandable.”

This woman didn’t know about Silvano and her brother, that much had already become clear from Di Maira’s transcript of her telephone call to her mother when Silvano was arrested in ’86.

She didn’t know.

“She was so frightened of him she wouldn’t take the baby afterwards. She said if she took him then Silvano would have an excuse to be coming to the house all the time and she didn’t want that. She said she didn’t want him laying hands on me.”

“That’s understandable, too, though that poor child—”

“Well, he left almost immediately, in any case, taking with him a pistol that he stole from my uncle and that he used to kill that couple. Those people need never have died if someone had cared then about what he did to Margherita.”

It was clear from her pinched look and the bitter downward turn of her mouth that the beautiful scene spread below them was no longer visible to her. She was back inside her dark memories.

“You never believed in the suicide story, then, even as a child?”

“Suicide? Nobody believed that, but she’d been seen with another man, you see, and that put her beyond the pale with everybody in the village. I didn’t know that then but I did know I’d spent the day of her death helping her to get what few clothes she and the baby had together, ready to leave. She didn’t dare put them in bags or anything because he’d have seen. We just made a little stack in the drawer. There was a letter, though, I saw it. A letter from the orphanage saying they were expecting her, and she had her ticket. I was the only person who’d seen those things. She hadn’t even told my mother she was going. They’d have stopped her, my parents. It was an unthinkable disgrace to leave your husband, no matter what he did to you …

“I was there with her until about six o’clock. Then she said:

“ ‘Warm Amelio’s bottle for me, then you’d better go.”

“I put some water on to boil so I could stand the bottle in it. Up to then I’d just felt excited, because she was doing something daring and new. I suppose I caught the excitement from her, but we were frightened, as well. Frightened that any minute he could come in and suspect something.

“We kept our voices very low, as if he might be listening. But then I went in the bedroom to get the baby. He was jumping up and down in his cot and he was starting to cry a bit. Then, when he saw me, he stopped and smiled and pointed at me. I said to him, ‘Say Ida.’ I’d been trying for ages to make him say my name.

“ ‘
Dee-da
!’ It was the first time. Then I realized they were going and that I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again. Margherita had been
more of a mother to me than a sister, being so much older. Then I heard her burst into tears in the kitchen and I ran back. She was sitting at the kitchen table with her head down on her arm. All her tension was gone, she’d just collapsed. I went closer and touched her hair.

“ ‘What’s happened?’

“ ‘The gas has run out, I can’t do the bottle, and these are the only stockings I’ve got for tomorrow and they’re laddered.’

“ ‘I can ask Mum for some stockings for you.’

“ ‘You can’t, she’ll know there’s something going on.’

“ ‘I can run to Marcello’s then, and tell him to bring a canister of gas.’

“ ‘He won’t come. I haven’t paid for the last one and I’ve no money. Just go home.’

“ ‘I could stay for my supper.’

“I often did because
he
almost always ate at his mother’s and then went out. I was scared of staying, really, that night, because I was sure he’d know something was up and start hitting her, but I was scared of leaving her like that, as well. The baby started crying for his milk. I suppose he could hear her.

“ ‘We’ve got to warm his bottle. Shall I ask next door?’

“We were always having to do that.

“ ‘I’ll go myself, you go home.’

“ ‘I could stay for—’

“ ‘No!’

“It was because she had no food. She didn’t want me to know because she was ashamed. I think she felt more shame about that than about the black eyes and things. I found out the next day when it was all over. The woman from the flat next to Margherita’s came round to see my mother after the carabinieri had been there. I saw her coming from the window and made myself scarce. Then I crept to the kitchen door and listened in. I couldn’t hear much of it, but though the scraps I did hear were incomprehensible I sensed what it all meant.

“ ‘I told the Marshal … my husband the same … then again at about ten-ish. Now, if there was no gas …’

“ ‘Doctor didn’t know his business …’

“ ‘Make a complaint …’

“ ‘Scratches all over her face … and another thing, if she’d intended to do away with herself she wouldn’t have wanted to be found in that state. Her knickers soaked in blood. And she’d never in this world … It stands to reason, she’d have seen to herself …’

“ ‘My husband said he must have … you know … all over her stomach. I hadn’t the courage to go in. How you could have …’

“ ‘Dirty pig and in front of the child …’

“ ‘Do you think it’s true she was intending …’

“ ‘No, no, no, I’m not having that. No daughter of mine would leave her husband.’

“ ‘He did used to paste her, though, after all.’

“ ‘She made her bed and she had to lie in it.’

“ ‘Oh … you’re a hard woman …’

“ ‘It’s a hard world … We’ve had enough shame brought on us without looking for more. What’s done is done.’

“ ‘I can’t help thinking … She was so hungry she was in tears. That second time she knocked I gave her a big bowl of bean and pasta soup I’d made for today …’

“I ran away then and broke my heart. I don’t know why but I thought of that bowl of soup … She must have been hungry most of the time and she had always sent me home when there was no food so I wouldn’t realize …”

She fumbled in her handbag, but the Marshal, always well supplied with clean handkerchiefs for his eyes, was quicker.

“Thank you. I’m sorry.” She stared unseeing at the brilliant scene beyond the windscreen, then turned a little away from him and blew her nose.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “It’s the stupidest little things that bring it all back. The bean and pasta soup, the ladder in her stocking. I shouldn’t have left her, should I? If I’d stayed he couldn’t have done it and the next day she’d have been safe from him.”

“You were only a child.”

“What did that matter! He couldn’t have murdered her in front
of me. Amelio couldn’t talk but I could. I’ll never forgive myself as long as I live.”

Was that what the headaches she talked of were about? Punishing herself? You heard a lot of talk about that sort of thing. It wasn’t something the Marshal knew much about so he took a different line.

“No wonder you hate Silvano.”

“I detest him. I’d kill him with my bare hands if I’d the strength.”

“He destroyed your sister’s life and it sounds as though you’ve let him destroy yours, too.”

“He’s destroyed more lives than mine and Margherita’s. What about that couple he shot? And the child who was in the car? What sort of life can he have had after that? What about his own child? I thought when the boy ran away from him and came up north to me it was some sort of sign. I’m not religious, Marshal, I confess I’m too bitter for that. Even so, I thought that was my chance to make up for abandoning my poor sister that night, to give him a home, as my mother didn’t want him either. The poor thing attached himself to Flavio who must have been about sixteen and who, in any case, was no better than his brother. Then when
he
married again, Flavio brought the boy to Florence. You can imagine the life … the things he told me.”

“I suppose it was difficult, a stepmother, and so on.”

“Stepmother? He was glad enough to get anything in the way of a mother but it didn’t last.
He
drove her out with his violence and the boy ran away and came to me. He tried running to Flavio Vargius first but there was no escape from his father there. Well, my mother said I’d rue the day and, of course, I did.”

“He didn’t stay?”

“Oh, he stayed. At least, he was officially living with me until he was twenty-one. But a lot of that time he was in prison. I realized even before that that something was going on when he came home in a fancy red car when he was out of work. There’s never been anything of that sort in our family and I couldn’t cope. When the police ordered him out of the region it was a relief, I confess. You can imagine my mother, at that point:

‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you. He’s his father’s son as well as Margherita’s.’

Anyway, suffice it to say the whole thing was a failure.”

“You did your best.”

“I keep on doing my best, Marshal, but it’s never good enough, is it? My sister, then this …”

“I understand how you feel, signora, but I wish you’d consider whether you’re going to allow Silvano to ruin your whole life. Blame him, not yourself. He killed your sister, not you.”

“But nothing I told you people last time helped to convict him, did it? So why do you want to hear it all again? Are you looking for him?”

“Not exactly …”

“You still don’t know where he is?”

“Are you afraid of him?”

“I don’t know.” She considered this a moment, folding and unfolding the handkerchief between her fingers. “I haven’t spoken to him since I was twelve, since the days immediately after Margherita’s funeral. He left then and I left Sardinia the minute I was old enough to get out. The next time I saw him was in court in eighty-eight. That’s the only time I’ve ever set foot in Sardinia again. As to being frightened, I don’t really know. The truth is, I wouldn’t have recognized him if he hadn’t been in the dock. His hair had turned grey, as mine has. Anyway, for what it’s worth, I do know where he is. He’s in Uruguay.”

“He’s …? How did you find that out?”

“From my nephew. I never see him now and I don’t want to. And he never contacts me unless there’s some news of his father. You’ll think we’re obsessed by him …”

“No, no.”

“Well, there’s a third person who probably hates him as we do, or nearly. The second wife. I’ve never met her but I gather she, at any rate, still sees Amelio. The reason we know where Silvano is now is that she gave him a divorce which he asked for through his lawyer in Sardinia because, if you’ll believe me, he wanted to marry again and
did so. In Uruguay. That’s the only new thing I can tell you, for what it’s worth.”

“I’m glad to know about it, whatever it turns out to be worth. And now I’d better drive you to the station or you’ll miss your train.”

When she left him he watched her walk into the station, her shoulders a little hunched, her bag clasped tightly, her face anxious and defensive. So many ruined lives. He could hear Di Maira’s voice:
“Get that bastard … It’s him, it’s him.”

Di Maira, too, had talked to this woman but, obsessed as he was with Silvano’s guilt, he didn’t seem to have listened too carefully to what she had to say.

“Marco? I know and I’m sorry, but I didn’t open the papers yesterday. If you’ve had your lunch come round here.” He hung up, and went back to reading intently.