Christobel Kent - A Darkness Descending

And something else. Luisa put her face close to the screen. ‘Can you blow this up?’ she said. She pulled back and Giuli moved in, deftly sliding something to adjust the image.

This was a room where no woman washed the sheets, this was a room meant only for this kind of liaison, where women came and went, under the tacky pastel of a child over the bed, the ugly mirrored wardrobe. Under the eye of the camera.

‘A laundry mark,’ Luisa said, her face close to the screen. ‘Verna, it says. Lavanderia Verna.’ She turned back and they were all staring at her now, even Enzo, who seemed to have been interrupted halfway through forming a declaration of his own. ‘I must have passed the Lavanderia Verna a hundred times,’ she said. ‘It’s on the Via Pisana. On the road to the seaside.’

‘Through the Isolotto,’ said Gloria, bewildered. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘This is Flavia Matteo. We’re talking about her, not Chiara, in the Isolotto. Aren’t we talking about her?’

‘Perhaps we’re talking about both of them,’ said Luisa.

*

Chiara lay on the wide bed and saw herself reflected in the mirror: saw her girl’s arms, her narrow calves too slender as they emerged from under the pale pink silk. I’m nineteen, she told herself. I’m only nineteen. All of her strained to listen for him: through the window she could hear the old women’s voices on the balcony below. Now she knew what that warning was, that she had always heard in the voices of women older than her. Sometimes you don’t know, they were saying. You think it’s what you want, but you don’t know. You think you’re in control, but sometimes they’re too strong for you.

A car pulled up outside.

Was that what Sandro’s old brain had been trying to find a place for, ever since that morning when he’d sat in the car and watched the traumatized insurance claimant smoking on the balcony? That name. 3 September, 3.20 p.m., the first Friday of September last year. Two cars behind the accident, a good citizen had given his name and a witness statement — although his female passenger had not been named. They had been on their way to the seaside.

Had it frightened Flavia Matteo, on her way to that luxurious hotel with a near-stranger? A car accident: it must have seemed like fate. A narrow escape.

The two men stood outside the barracks, the eye of a surveillance camera on them. They’d spoken their piece into the intercom but the doors were still closed: Pietro stood with his fists clenched as if he would need no persuasion to begin battering on the door.

Giuli had been as cool as a cucumber on the phone: that’s my girl, Sandro had thought as she’d delivered her evidence, piece by piece.

‘I’ve seen him,’ she’d said. ‘He’s in the photographs. Enzo’d saved everything on those computers on his USB key, two weeks ago. He does it routinely.’ She’d taken a breath. ‘I’ve seen the man, and I’ve read his messages. I wouldn’t recognize him in the street, because he keeps his face hidden, but I know what novels he reads. I know how he thinks. I know what he thinks of us. Of women. I’ve got his number: and I’ve got it literally, too. I know his phone number: she called him Anna K.’

And when the name had come to him, and the face attached, it had been as though Sandro had known it all along.

He wasn’t sure he should have told Pietro. That was a worry, looking at his old friend’s clenched fists now, his face almost unrecognizable, almost deranged.

But how could Sandro not have told him?

‘They think it’s the same guy,’ he’d said. ‘Luisa and Gloria — and Giuli too. It was Gloria saw it first, Giuli said. Your Gloria, she said, And now they’re trying to get to Pietro. Through Chiara.’

They wouldn’t have gone for his wife, would they? Not for Gloria. She wasn’t damaged like Flavia Matteo, she hadn’t spent her life repressing anything, she wasn’t at a dangerous age. So they went for little Chiara, the bold, rebellious child everyone knew and loved, that member of the new generation of girls who thought they could handle it all. Maybe each new generation thought that.

‘Looks like he’s got a place in the Isolotto,’ Sandro had said. ‘Do you think that might be where Chiara’s living now?’

And with a dark look of pulverizing, murderous rage, Pietro had shoved past him without a word and out of the Bar dell’Orto, almost shattering the glass door as he flung it violently open. Sandro had thought he might scream something in the quiet street. But instead it was Pietro’s turn to ask the same question Sandro had asked him. ‘Never mind they. I want to see this bastard’s face.’

Was it the sword that had given him the answer? Not the copy of Anna Karenina — Anna K? — not the bust of Aristotle, not the description of him leaning against the mirrored wardrobe, tall and lean, an older man. An arrogant bastard, Giuli had said, with contempt.

Yes: the sword. The man Flavia had dreamed of, the man who cut women into pieces, the man who pursued her down the city’s dark, luxurious streets.

And that photograph of a man in full dress uniform standing on the shelf in his office alongside the Tolstoy and the philosophy and the chessmen. The soldier’s hand resting on the pommel of a sword. Sometimes in a dream a sword is just a sword.

He would be up above them in his room now, with his long legs stretched out as he contemplated his victory over the left-wing rabble.

The barracks door swung inwards.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the soldier in fatigues whose name Sandro only in that moment remembered as Canova and who stood now blocking their path with his careless good looks and his unassailable indifference.

Even before he finished speaking, the heavy door was beginning to close steadily between them. The soldier stepped back into the shadows as it moved.

‘I’m afraid that Colonello Arturo has left for the day.’

Sandro and Pietro could only watch as the door closed, and they were on the outside again.

*

‘They’ll find her,’ said Giuli, looking into Gloria’s golden eyes, her pale face contracted with terror. On the other side, Luisa held her friend’s hand.

‘You have to leave it to her father,’ she said. They’d closed the lid of Enzo’s laptop but the images hadn’t left anyone’s head. ‘He needs to be the one.’

‘They’ll find her,’ repeated Enzo, from his corner, clutching the mobile. ‘Those two — if anyone can do it.’

Were they all thinking the same thing? wondered Giuli as she heard the uncertainty in his voice, and no one spoke. That there comes a time when those we’ve always looked up to, the all-powerful parents, are suddenly too old, too slow, too late?

‘Can you give me that?’ she said, and obediently Enzo handed her the phone. She looked down at the name, and the number attached to it.

‘It was the novel she was reading,’ Giuli explained. ‘One of the books Flavia left with Wanda Terni, along with her notebook. Anna Karenina. Anna K.’

And then there was a silence. Not just in the room between them but outside, something like a vast collective intake of breath and a sudden hush that was almost suffocating after the rising din, as though a great blanket had been thrown over the crowd.

‘Niccolo,’ said Enzo. ‘I knew he’d go out there.’ He looked at Giuli, and she saw he was afraid. ‘What will they do to him?’

She held up a hand: she was dialling. She felt the adrenaline rise in her, in her throat, as she waited to hear his voice, at last.

*

Chiara had put the little case in the kitchen so he wouldn’t see it, but he knew as he came through the door. Even though she was wearing what he’d told her to wear, lay where he wanted her to lie, on the white bed under the ugly painting. She made sure not to look in the direction that would give her away.