The Innocent Page 8

  ‘No, no …’

  Peruzzi? No. Whatever the sleeping arrangements might be behind the workshop, they could hardly be conducive to a clandestine affair. Peruzzi was a widower. He could have taken her home if he’d wanted to. He must have made a small fortune in his time and never left his last long enough to spend any of it. Of course, a man of his age might feel a bit foolish, falling for such a young woman. But when did Peruzzi ever care a damn what anybody thought? Unless the fright of his illness had changed him completely. No, no … Whatever his faults, Peruzzi wasn’t capable of hypocrisy. A little place of her own, Lapo had said. Peruzzi might be paying for that. No, no …

  He stood at the open window for a long time, breathing the morning air, staring down at the laurel bushes without seeing them. What was he doing? A young woman was dead and he was trying to exonerate two obvious suspects before even having questioned them. Well, he had until tomorrow to pull himself together. In the meantime, the laurel-scented air was now carrying wafts of bacon and tomato sauce to him. The lads upstairs, pink tiles or no pink tiles, must be happily cooking up mountains of pasta in their freshly painted kitchen and he himself was looking forward to roast rabbit. He looked at his watch.

  Teresa wouldn’t add that final splash of wine until he was changing out of his uniform. He closed the window.

  Teresa always liked to lay the table in the dining room on Sundays though she no longer used her mother’s handmade lace cloth, saying she couldn’t get it laundered in Florence. At home in Sicily it had been sent to the nuns who cared for the altar cloths. Today there was a glossy green cloth. There was also an ominous silence. He placed an open bottle of wine on its silver coaster and looked at the boys. Giovanni gazed up at him, his big brown eyes full of apprehension.

  ‘All right, son?’

  He only bit his lip and lowered his gaze. Had they been quarrelling? If they had, Teresa had clearly put a stop to it. And, by the look on Totò’s face, he’d got the worst of his mother’s telling off. Surely he hadn’t been crying? He didn’t cry easily, unlike Giovanni, because he was fiercely proud. When he did, it was usually more in anger than in sorrow.

  Nothing was said about whatever it was and the marshal remained lost in his meanderings about artisans and foreigners, and whether they should go to Lapo’s for Giovanni’s birthday. They ate ravioli stuffed with ricotta and spinach, and Teresa gave his a sprinkling of grated cheese and black pepper. No butter.

  Afterwards, she came in with a huge oval dish of roasted rabbit joints in a herb-scented gravy, surrounded by crisp little roast potatoes. ‘Ah …’

  Totò jumped up from his seat.

  ‘Totò!’ Teresa’s tone made it clear that whatever it was had already been dealt with and that she was in no mood for any more of it. ‘Sit down, please. You can eat some potatoes and a green salad.’

  ‘No, I can’t! I’ve told you I can’t! How can I eat anything with a dead animal lying on the table? I’d be sick! It’s disgusting!’ He shot out of the room, crying. Giovanni gazed from one parent to the other, his brown eyes eloquent of a soul torn between distress for his brother and hunger for Sunday roast.

  His mother started to serve him.

  ‘Pass me your plate, too, will you, Salva. This serving dish is too hot to move.’

  ‘I can do that. Don’t you want to go and get Totò?’

  ‘No. He’s best left alone for now. I’ll give him something to eat later.’

  And, though Teresa had never tolerated finicky eating or bad manners at the table, her tone was quiet, even tender.

  Well, she wouldn’t want him interfering. She’d said a few times lately:

  —Don’t say anything to him, Salva. Promise me.

  So he kept quiet. Giovanni was watching, waiting for a sign. They, at least, understood each other. He smiled at him and they tucked in.

  That night, when he was in bed and Teresa was putting a refill in the mosquito killer, he ventured to ask, ‘Did he eat some supper, at least?’

  ‘Some yoghurt and cereal.’

  ‘Yoghurt … ? He’s a growing boy, for God’s sake! Not only that but half the world’s children are starving while he’s complaining—’

  ‘Salva.’

  ‘But it’s true.’

  ‘I know it’s true. Please don’t say anything to him. You promised me, remember.’

  ‘Have I said a word? Have I?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I know what my mother would have done.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘Of course I do! She’d have given me a good hiding if I’d dared to behave like that!’

  ‘No, she wouldn’t.’

  ‘She’d have given me a good hiding, I’m telling you.’

  ‘How many times in your life did your mother ever give you a good hiding?’

  He lay there a moment, thinking it over, then admitted, ‘Only once, that I can remember … but that’s only because I would never have dared—’

  ‘So what had you done?’

  ‘Eh? Oh … I forget.’

  ‘Go on, what?’

  ‘I’ve just said, I forget.’

  ‘It’s funny, isn’t it? People have confessed murder to you, plenty of times, but nobody ever confesses to wetting the bed.’

  ‘I didn’t wet the bed!’

  ‘I didn’t say you did. I’m just saying that people confess monstrous crimes but not little embarrassments.’ She got into bed and switched the bedside lamp off. ‘I suppose it had something to do with food.’

  Under cover of darkness he admitted, ‘I stole Nunziata’s birthday chocolates … and ate some of them.’

  ‘How many of them?’

  ‘What does it matter how many? Stealing’s stealing, isn’t it?’

  ‘How many?’

  Silence. Then, very quietly: ‘All of them.’

  ‘I thought so. Leave Totò to me, Salva. Poor little thing. He’s in love.’

  ‘Oh, no! Oh, please! Not him, too! For God’s sake, Teresa, he’s a child!’

  ‘A teenager. And keep calm.’

  ‘I am calm!’

  ‘Sh …’ Her arm slid over his chest. ‘She’s in his class and she’s very pretty. I’ve seen her.’

  ‘Hmph.’

  ‘Her father’s Sicilian and her mother’s Danish. She has the most beautiful long blonde curls and dark eyes.’

  ‘And she’s a vegetarian, I suppose.’

  ‘And she’s a vegetarian.’ She kissed his cheek and whispered, ‘You went on a diet for me once upon a time, if you remember.’

  He turned to her in the dark with a sort of sorrowful tenderness and murmured, ‘I go on a diet for you practically every day.’

  *

  The next day, in excellent spirits, he sailed through a morning in court and then tackled the problem of Peruzzi.

  There was a couple in the workshop. Foreigners, you could see that. They were big and heavy, and the woman’s bare arms were roasted red. They had their backs to Peruzzi whose gimlet eye looked murderous.

  ‘If you go to my shop in Borgo San Jacopo, you’ll find more choice there and an assistant to help you!’

  This was ignored, no doubt because they didn’t understand a word of it.

  The woman had picked a shoe out of the window and now she put it on the floor and drew back the linen curtain to reach in for another. Her husband was busy with a pocket calculator. They looked at the results of his calculations and spoke for a moment in their own language. Then she dropped the second shoe on the floor and they walked out without a word.

  Peruzzi’s face was purple.

  ‘Did you see that? Like they’re in a supermarket! They come in here without a word to me and stand two feet away from me discussing my shoes as though I didn’t exist. And then the calculator. They all do it—and you can bet they’re wondering how it is that my shoes cost more than the factory-made rubbish they see at home. Thank you and good-morning. A pleasure to have met you!’ He slammed the door and locked it
. Outside, the couple were unfolding a map, oblivious. Peruzzi went back to his last, muttering fiercely. The marshal was pretty sure he caught the word ‘flame-thrower’ and thought to himself that Peruzzi hardly needed one. The tiny workshop vibrated with his burning anger.

  ‘Steady on …’ he dared to say. ‘Your health’s more important … Couldn’t you just keep your door shut?’

  ‘It’s hot, damn it!’ He got up and wrenched it open. Then he turned his angry eyes on the marshal. ‘And you don’t need to tell me what you’re here for, either!’ He wagged his large hand in the marshal’s face. ‘I’ve nothing more to say about it! If she’s not in Rome I don’t know where she is! She could have gone back to Tokyo for all I know—and if you’ve got the time to be running round after youngsters who don’t know their own minds, I haven’t! All right?’

  The marshal stood his ground, his face expressionless, but anger seemed to rebound from the walls of the little room and all his carefully prepared preliminaries were clearly useless. Lapo must have talked, though without telling all.

  ‘Can we sit down a minute?’ He spoke very quietly in the hope of defusing the situation.

  ‘Look, I’ve said already she had a friend in Rome! That’s all I know! How many more of you do I have to say it to before you all leave me in peace?’

  ‘Peruzzi, sit down, will you. I know, partly anyway, what happened to your other apprentice, the Japanese girl. I need to talk to you. It’s important and you might well find it upsetting, so please, let’s sit down.’

  He saw the anger drain from Peruzzi’s face and at once regretted its going. Despite his height, his wiriness and his big bony face, he looked old and vulnerable all of a sudden, without his prickly shell. It crossed the marshal’s mind that if he took the news really badly, which he well might, he wouldn’t recover. If, instead of his old bristly self, he should become a pathetic invalid …

  Still, there was no going back. What could he do? He persuaded him to sit down and then he told him.

  He didn’t look at Peruzzi as he talked, but sitting beside him on the smooth old bench he felt every catch in his breath, every increase of tension in his wiry frame. Beyond the half-drawn linen curtain people were going about their business. Lapo’s head passed by above his hedge, a motorino was heard revving up. An invisible someone called down from a high window to an upturned face below. But it was all like something happening in another dimension, like on television with the sound turned low. He couldn’t avoid admitting that the girl’s face was unrecognisable but he didn’t say why, didn’t say there was no face. Or hands. The hands that would have talked to Forli would have talked to Peruzzi, too. He’d taught them what they knew and that must be important to him. Well, he wasn’t going to say anything about the fish in the pool, not when he was convinced he could hear Peruzzi’s heart pounding. Talk steadily, quietly, taking the longest way round, giving him time to take it in bit by bit … could an ambulance get into the tiny square, if … ? The approaches were so narrow it would surely scrape the walls if it got through at all. He was so tense, so silent. One of his outbursts of rage, being more familiar, would be less alarming. How long was it since the operation? Perhaps he needn’t say yet that he was talking about murder. Peruzzi was sharp, he might understand, ask. Don’t tell him everything, no need for that. The smooth old bench, the gloom, the seclusion from the rest behind the curtain, the leathery smell of the kneeler … Don’t tell everything …

  —Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned …

  Had he ever confessed about the chocolates? Was it before or after his first confession? In any case, it was always a problem, that horrible feeling of shame that never seemed to attach itself to any particular event, so he always used to make his sins up.

  —I have been disobedient to my father three times and to my mother four times …

  Juggling the numbers each week. The curtain had been thick, rough, velvety stuff, dark red …

  Talk to him about her quietly, things learned from Lapo. Keep talking of good things about her until he joins in. If he talks he’ll have to breathe properly.

  The door always used to creak as you pushed your way out of the darkness to the candlelight. Then the priest, old and cross, would grasp at the dark curtain with a gnarled hand and peer out at you, checking who’d been and who hadn’t …

  Only tell him what’s really necessary. Details can wait for another day.

  Peruzzi’s head dropped into his hands and he rubbed at his eyes, then turned and interrupted. ‘How can you be sure? If you say she … if her face—how can you be sure? There are dozens of Japanese tourists in town …’

  ‘But you know, do you, where she went to eat her sandwich and take a stroll to stretch her legs.’

  ‘Sitting at a last all day … I ought to have done the same and maybe I wouldn’t be in this state now …’

  ‘Did you ever go with her?’

  ‘No. No, I’ve always liked a good meal and five minutes with the paper. No, I never …’ He was staring out of the show window but without seeing anything. He got up and drew the linen curtain closed, then sat down again. His face was very white, with blue shadows round the lips.

  The marshal went on, gentle, watchful, ‘But still, you know the places where she went, perhaps? Does the place I described to you sound likely?’

  ‘She told me she just walked around until she found somewhere quiet. A garden, a fountain in a square … getting to know Florence, she said. Not the Boboli Gardens so often because you have to pay—you can’t be sure, can you? Not if her face …’

  In silence, the marshal offered him the shoe. He didn’t recoil as the nervous apprentice had done. He took it into his large hand, which almost enveloped it, and ran his fingers over the stitching as if he could read it like braille.

  ‘We’ll still need a formal identification—’

  ‘She learned in a year what took me five.’ Still his bony, work-scarred fingers were reading the shoe, seam by seam. The marshal couldn’t take his eyes from this process. ‘She had a different way of learning things, you see, not like ours. Not just repetition, not trial and error.’ His fingers read on but he didn’t look down at the shoe.

  ‘Right from the start, if something didn’t come out right she’d make me show her again and then she’d sit still for a long, long time, thinking. Then she’d do it again and it would be right. Not perfect, and not quick, either, but right. Of course, she has brains, that’s the difference. She has brains …’

  ‘We must inform her parents if you have an address.’ He didn’t know which would be worse, to show that ravaged skull to her parents or to Peruzzi. He still hadn’t understood what their real relationship had been and besides, the last thing he needed now was to have Peruzzi clam up on him because of letting the apprentices live in. He trod carefully. He didn’t much like the look of that blueness round the lips. He didn’t like that at all. He would ask for her address and her parents’ address, too. They were bound to get her DNA from something in her flat. He didn’t take his eyes off the shoemaker, who was still staring at nothing as his fingers contacted her through the stitching of the little shoe. What should he do? In his head he asked Captain Maestrangelo, who would surely know. In his head, came the captain’s answer:

  —Follow your instinct. You decide. You know your people.

  Earth, air, fire, water, and the Florentines …

  What did it mean, after all? Sitting beside him was a man, growing old, who had invested something of himself, the marshal didn’t know quite what, in this young foreigner.

  ‘If only she’d been willing to marry. She always swore she wouldn’t but I thought that with the baby … then she would have stayed. She said she was so happy here but you never know, you see, whether one day her own country, her own people … you never know. A baby would have made a difference, wouldn’t it?’ He turned and looked into the marshal’s eyes searching for an answer.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure it would have made a differen
ce.’

  Peruzzi looked down at the shoe as if seeing it for the first time. He turned it over and examined it for faults, then ran his hand round the edge of the sole. ‘The first layer is leather, the second rubber, the third leather again. Waterproof. But she put this little stick-on rubber sole anyway. You see, she wanted them to last for ever because they were her first.’ He smiled at the thought, then fell silent and stared into space again.

  Follow your instinct. That was all very well but whatever unreasonable hopes Peruzzi might have had—and he wouldn’t be the first—what, in heaven’s name, had the Japanese girl been thinking about? She wouldn’t be the first either, if she’d wanted to make a fool of an old man. No, no … nothing about that idea was right. She was learning a trade, a skill from him. She would have admired him for what he could teach her, of course, and there was no accounting for what women found attractive … And she was pregnant, after all, but—

  He was going to need a DNA sample from Peruzzi in case there was evidence that he’d been in her flat. Well, he wasn’t going to ask for that today.

  He scanned Peruzzi’s face. His colour seemed slightly better. ‘How are you feeling? This has been a shock, I know, and you have to be careful.’

  Try as he might, he just couldn’t see it. But who paid for the clothes if not Peruzzi? Who? Why not just ask him?

  ‘Peruzzi? You’ve said she was a pretty young woman and I hear from your neighbours around here—who seemed to be fond of her—that she liked to dress well.’

  ‘She has taste, very refined …’

  ‘Yes, but fine clothes are expensive and I gather she had very little money so I can’t help asking who paid for them.’

  ‘She buys them herself. Her family has money—he probably told you that—but she won’t ask them for anything, anything at all.’

  So, the only thing Lapo hadn’t gossiped about was her death—and that was probably only out of fear for Peruzzi’s damaged heart. Blast the man. He wouldn’t have believed it of him.