The Innocent (2 page)

The marshal, anyway, plodded on, going in and out of the big shops, breathing beeswax, mustiness and flowers, enjoying the dark-red polished floors, the inlaid woods, the antique brocades. If he worked for a lifetime and saved every penny he wouldn’t be able to afford one piece from any of these shops but he could enjoy looking at everything. He’d never, as far as he could remember, seen a customer and he found it all strange except for Pino’s shop on the corner of Piazza San Felice, his favourite and the only one where he lingered to talk. Pino wasn’t like the others. His shop was just as big and grand, his pieces just as priceless but, though he wore a pale silk bow tie, it was peeping out above a white coat. He restored his treasures himself, together with his son, in a huge workshop below. He was a refined man, a knowledgeable man, that was obvious, but he was more like Lapo than like his fellow antique dealers and he had a greater passion for his work than for the money it earned him. No thief who knew his business would try to get anything past Pino, who accepted the marshal’s list without comment and pushed it in a drawer without so much as a glance at it.

‘Come downstairs a minute. I’m sorry about this … can you push your way through?’

Pino and his son were both thin and the dark corridor leading to the stairs down to the workshop was always lined with furniture and heavy picture frames. The marshal slid his sunglasses into his top pocket, breathed in and shuffled along sideways. He liked the room below, deep and shadowy with a high barred window looking on to the trunk of a palm tree in the spent light of a courtyard. A radio was playing quietly. Pino’s son, in a pool of light, looked up from his work and pushed darkrimmed glasses up to the bridge of his nose, smiling. There was no need of a pretext. Father and son both knew that the marshal enjoyed a look at their work when he had the time.

‘How do you like these?’ Pino asked: a set of stools, low, square and heavy, the pale-green and gold decoration worn and faded over hundreds of years. ‘Medici stools. I bought eleven of them when the Palazzo Ulderighi was sold off to that bank, but one’s a bad one. Look.’

The marshal drew closer and peered at the one young Marco was working on. ‘Woodworm …’

‘Not woodworm. Somebody did a bit of cack-handed restoration work. Whatever happened to the original seat, this one’s new. The woodworm holes are fake. Marco will probably do what we call a differentiated restoration where the added part is clearly differentiated, like this piece here, look …’

The marshal, watching and listening and understanding perhaps half of what was said, wondered what it must be like to have a father who had so much skill, such a treasury of knowledge to offer. He envied the young man. At once, envy was overtaken by guilt at the memory of his own father trying to teach him to prune the vines.

—Leave only three shoots—no, no … You have to pick them carefully … one here on the left, this is a strong one in the middle and you pick the third one … that’s it. Right, now snip it off clean. Now wrap the willow wand round and round and twist it … no, no … watch me.

So patient with such a clumsy son whose plump fingers never managed to twine the red wand in a way that held. His father’s fingers had black cracks in them but they also had knowledge. He’d offered what he had, knowing there was no future in it, wanting his children to get away.

‘I ought to get on …’ Had he interrupted Pino in mid-sentence? He did that sometimes, he knew. His wife had often said so.

—You don’t listen to a word I say. You’ve got a conversation of your own going on in your head and you come out with some completely irrelevant remark and I’m supposed to know what you’re talking about!

And the odd thing was that she always did. How did you explain that?

The morning mist coming off the river hadn’t quite dissolved. The marshal rang Signora Verdi’s doorbell, a topfloor flat round the corner in via Mazzetta, but no one answered. When he left the cold shadow of the high buildings in via Maggio to climb the exposed slope to Palazzo Pitti the sun was very hot. He had used up that first hour or so that ought to be spent on dull paperwork very pleasantly and was in good shape to deal with whatever his waiting room had in store for him. As it turned out, the tiled and windowless room offered up only two souls, one with a formal report to do with a small insurance claim, the other a small round woman of ninety-one with plump cheeks and big glasses.

‘Signora Verdi! I told you I’d come and see you. What are you thinking of, walking here and climbing these stairs?’

‘I have to walk. If I give up now it’ll be for ever—and what are your stairs compared with mine? Anyway, I came to thank you.’ She reached for his arm and he helped her up.

‘Come into my office. And don’t be thanking me. If a few more people were as quick off the mark as you, there’d be less of that sort of thing going on. Come and sit down with me.’

‘That sort of thing’ was a yet another couple of cheap conmen in blue overalls carrying a clipboard and saying they were from the gas company. They claimed to be installing a new safety device at the back of all cookers, required by law, frightening old people with stories of explosions and going off with their signature and ten euros. Signora Verdi had told them she had no money in the house and asked them to come back the next day. They found two carabinieri waiting for them.

They had a little chat now, then Signora Verdi said, ‘I’m going because that man in the waiting room was here before me. There’s no banister on your stairs, though. Will that nice young carabiniere help me down?’

‘Of course he will. I’ll take you through. And whatever you say, you did a good job. I wish you worked for me.’

Once on her feet, she lifted her arms and gave him a little hug and, when he left her with carabiniere Di Nuccio, she said, ‘My cooker’s electric.’

The man with the insurance claim stood up.

‘Come in, Franco, come in …’

Nobody else appeared after that, so the marshal found time for the paperwork he’d hoped to avoid and a quiet talk with a new man, not long out of NCO school, who wasn’t getting on at all well lately. Nothing had occurred yet to spoil his cheerful spring mood. When he stopped work and went back to his quarters, Teresa was in the kitchen, making spaghetti alla Norma, his favourite.

‘I know you shouldn’t have anything fried—but it was so lovely and sunny at the market this morning, I felt inspired—and you know the shepherd who comes on Wednesdays—well, it’s not often he brings salted ricotta, so … Anyway, as long as you don’t eat too much of it …’

He ate too much of it. It was wonderful. Of course, it’s not the sort of thing you can digest without a glass of red.

A little sigh of contentment escaped him. Even when Giovanni and Totò started one of their interminable quarrels, he maintained his silent, beatific calm and let Teresa deal with it.

‘Totò! That’s enough!’

‘Well, it’s true! He’s useless—and anyway, it’s only because I want to be a software engineer. He doesn’t even know what it means.’

‘I do.’

‘You don’t. With a brain like yours you might as well be a carabiniere.’

‘Totò!’ Teresa shot her husband a quick glance and added under her breath, ‘I said that’s enough. Give me your plates.’

Giovanni gave up his plate and passed on his dad’s. He looked crestfallen. The marshal, having only half followed the quarrel, wasn’t sure why. He placed a consoling hand on his son’s head but Giovanni cringed away from it.

Totò said, ‘I don’t want any meat.’

The marshal looked at his wife, who signed to him to ignore this.

Totò ate zucchini and bread. Giovanni ate everything and had cheered up by the time he was peeling his apple.

‘I’ll make the coffee.’ The marshal exercised exclusive rights over the gleaming brass espresso machine. Teresa started the washing up and the boys went off to their room to start quarrelling over their computer games instead of doing their homework. ‘D’you want it here or shall I take it through?’

‘Take it through, I won’t be a minute … the paper’s out there. I haven’t looked at it …’

He collected the newspaper that lay next to Teresa’s handbag and the bowl of keys on the chest near the entrance. He shuffled with tray and paper into the cool, quiet sitting room and settled in a big leather armchair to enjoy that most precious hour or so before getting back into uniform. Teresa let her coffee get cold but she did join him briefly and told him a number of things without sitting down.

‘So what do you think?’

‘What? Oh … well, whatever you think best. If you want me to talk to the electrician—’

‘Not about the new lights, about Totò? Anyway, tell me tonight, I haven’t time to talk now.’

He was fairly confident that, whatever it was, she would tell him again. He never stopped being amazed by her, amazed that she should be there, looking after everything, telling him things and then, somehow, knowing what should be done. How did she know things the way she did, when he was so often baffled and full of doubts about the future? Letting this insoluble mystery go, he finished the article he was reading and then dressed with care for a visit to Captain Maestrangelo, across the river at headquaters in via Borgognissanti.

The captain was not smiling.

‘I must just finish this call—no, make yourself comfortable …’ He waved a hand at the black leather three piece suite and the marshal walked across and settled down, his hat squarely on one knee. A carabiniere came in and put a tray of coffee on the low table before him.

‘Do you want the ashtray?’

‘No, no …’

It was removed. One of the tall windows was slightly open and a muslin curtain lifted on the faint afternoon breeze. The marshal waited, watching motes of dust revolve slowly in the shaft of sunlight that was warming the rug at his feet. After a while his gaze roved over the darkened oil paintings around the walls, overspill from a crowded museum. The captain was speaking into the receiver with such measured solemnity that anyone who didn’t know him would imagine he must be talking to the President of the Republic. The marshal, who did know him, knew that he spoke like that to the humblest of his carabinieri. He liked him for it. He liked him for his quiet intelligence, too, and for his honesty and his seriousness. The only thing about the captain that irritated him—though he couldn’t have said why—was when Teresa started going on about how good-looking he was.

—No, no … I’m not having that. No. He’s a good man but … no.

—So elegant in his uniform and such beautiful hands.

—Hands?

‘Don’t get up.’ One of the so-called beautiful hands, long and brown, grasped the marshal’s own. The captain sat down and poured thick coffee into tiny gold-rimmed cups.

‘So, were you able to make any sense of that business?’

‘Oh, yes, no trouble. The signora was quite right. You don’t get an electricity bill like that if you’ve been in Provence and … where was it … Mexico … for the last seven months. No, no. I was pretty sure it was going to be the two young men on the opposite landing. I had to go round there twice because they must have spotted my uniform from their window that first time—I think I told you—so I got her to let me in herself at the street door this time and then she knocked at their flat and called to them. Once they’d opened up it was all over. I told her to switch the current off in her flat and they were plunged into darkness.’

‘I imagined as much. How did they do it?’

‘Nothing complicated. She’d had an air-conditioning unit put in and they got at that from their adjoining terrace and hooked up to it. She said she’s not there that often so I suppose they felt entitled—you know how it is—rich foreigners putting up house prices and so on. American, is she?’

‘French. She was Washington correspondent for a French newspaper for some years.’

‘I see. She told me she’s researching a book about the origins of opera now. That’s a beautiful flat she’s got and some very valuable antiques. I took the liberty of suggesting a more reliable burglar alarm.’

‘You did right.’

‘A charming woman.’ A fine and elegant woman, too. Well, no doubt Teresa was right but he couldn’t see it. There was no response to this comment so he went on, ‘I’m afraid she won’t press charges. I couldn’t convince her. Of course, they’ll still be living next door to her and she’s alone. You can understand it, really. I think they went to see her and talked her out of it, paid back some of the money. I can’t make her change her mind and maybe she’s right, after all.’

‘It doesn’t matter. You’ve solved the problem. Thank you. Is everything all right with you?’

‘Never quieter.’

‘And the man you were worried about … Esposito, wasn’t it?’

‘Esposito, yes. I don’t know … I’ve had a talk with him but I’m just not sure. He’s very distressed, very. Maybe there’s something more than homesickness there—and besides, he seemed all right until just recently. I’ll have to keep an eye on him. He’s a good man, very serious. Very bright …’

They talked briefly about some building work to be done in the dormitories, held up interminably for lack of funds. Then they were interrupted by the colonel.

The marshal’s driver brought the car to the foot of the stone staircase and they drove out through the dim cloister into the sunshine and bustle of via Borgognissanti. The marshal was cheerful and relaxed, well satisfied with a pleasant day. Only when they were driving under the archway at the Pitti Palace did something seem not quite right. An announcement was coming over the address system in four languages, warning visitors to the Boboli Gardens behind the palace that they should make for the nearest exit since the gardens were closing. The normal announcement that went out every day towards sunset. But it was only half past five and the sun was still high and warm in the blue spring sky.

Two

‘A
nd where is this woman now?’

‘No idea.’ The gardener shrugged, on the defensive.

‘But you took her name?’

‘Took her name? As far as I knew, somebody was drowning. What would you have done? Started taking down her name and address and date of birth?’