The Italian Wife (38 page)

‘I’ll tell you,’ he said, his gaze on her face, ‘what happened six years ago. I was a photographer in Sorrento and Naples. I loved what I was doing and was putting together a series of photographic studies for an exhibition. I had found a sponsor who was excited about my work and the exhibition was going to be an exposition of the sea in all its moods. I’d go out in my father’s fishing boat in all weathers to capture the pictures I wanted. It was hard and dangerous at times but…’

Isabella listened. Fascinated. There was something in his voice, a tail-end of the excitement he had felt in those days.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘To earn a crust while I was scouring the sea with my camera, I took photographs of tourists. You know the sort. A quick snap while they’re at dinner and I return an hour later to sell the romantic moment to them preserved for ever as a photograph. Not exactly creative genius, but I made a living out of it.’

He fell silent.

She didn’t hurry him.

‘Then one evening I took the photograph that destroyed my life.’

‘What was it?’

‘I was doing the usual trawl of the restaurants in the town square in Sorrento and there was a small grey man at a table eating mussels, sauce glistening on his chin. He looked like a nobody, but with him was the most beautiful blonde, a pampered and petted young woman wearing too much make-up. She couldn’t keep her hands off him. I thought it strange but took my photograph anyway.’ He shrugged, a hard angular movement of his shoulders. ‘That was it. I was arrested on the spot. My camera destroyed. My studio and darkroom burned to the ground with all my photographs for the exhibition. That was the end.’

In two strides she was beside him, seated on the gaily coloured cover. She didn’t touch him.

‘Why, Roberto? Who was the man?’

‘He was —’ He stopped himself. ‘No, I’ll not name him, it’s safer for you not to know. But it turned out that he was one of Mussolini’s chief sidekicks.’

‘And the young woman?’

‘She was Mussolini’s current mistress at that time. She was spreading her favours too wide, it turned out.’

‘Oh, Roberto. But surely the man had destroyed the photograph? He didn’t have to destroy you.’

He turned and smiled at her, a crooked tilt of his mouth that made Isabella’s heart falter. ‘No, he didn’t trust me not to go to Mussolini even without the photograph, so he trumped up the charge of blackmail. Claimed I was trying to extort money.’ Again he gave that sharp sinewy shrug. ‘Don’t look like that, Isabella.’ He touched her chin, a tender little tweak. ‘I survived. As you can see.’

‘Five years? Was that the prison sentence?’

‘No, ten years.’

Her eyes widened. Outside, the wind had risen and the whole world seemed to be raining.

‘Ten years?’ she breathed.

‘Yes.’

‘But you only served five.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why only five years?’

‘Only? Only?’ He clenched his lips into a hard ironic line. ‘Five years inside one of Mussolini’s labour prisons for something you didn’t do is never “
only
”, Isabella.’

‘I know, Roberto,’ she whispered.

He gently stroked her bandaged hand. ‘But five is better than ten.’

‘How did you get out?’

‘How do you think?’

‘Grassi.’

‘Exactly.’

She leaned the weight of her shoulder against him.

‘That bastard came to me,’ Roberto continued, ‘and offered me a deal. To work for him. Or rot in that hell for another five years. A simple choice.’

Isabella felt a shudder pass through him.

‘So I took it,’ he said. ‘If it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else doing the job. At least I could ensure that…’ He frowned, drawing his brows together, and released a small groan of disgust.

‘Ensure that what?’

His foot drummed on the floor. ‘I tell myself that I ensure that some get away. Like the Caldarone family. Because I know who is in danger, I can prepare them ahead of time. Like I was teaching Gabriele and Alessandro to handle a plough. I warn them to give them a breathing space to escape. But not all succeed. I am not blind, Isabella, I know I have bought my freedom at the cost of others. And it disgusts me.’

It was said. The truth. It lay broken on the floor and Isabella had to bend down and pick it up. How could she know what decision she would have made in his place?

‘Listen to me, Roberto – you are right when you say that if you didn’t help Grassi, he would have found someone else to do the job, and that person might not be so considerate. But —’

But betrayal…

A long silence took hold of the room. Neither wanted to unearth more words, afraid of what they might find, of what they might feel.

‘This is an evil system, Isabella, that has Italy by the throat,’ Roberto said quietly. ‘That forces its people into such choices. Mussolini has banned all political opposition and crushed all freedom of the press, so it is no wonder that men like Rosa’s father turn to violence. They see no peaceful option. Mussolini and his Blackshirts are driving us to be people we never wanted to be.’

‘And did you spy on me?’

It was asked. The question fell into the silence and could not be taken back.

Roberto turned his face to her, a rapid movement that left no room for lies. ‘Yes.’

She nodded, letting the word sink into her mind.

‘Isabella, I promise you that I did nothing that would harm you. Grassi was convinced you were connected with Rosa’s father in some way. I did everything I could to convince him that he was a fool to believe such nonsense but he is not a man who listens. He wanted to arrest you at once after you went to see Rosa at the convent, but I persuaded him to wait. To let me coax the truth out of you, when all the time I was trying to keep you safe.’

Slowly Isabella began to stroke the back of his neck, to soothe the hard muscles bunched there, drawing the anger out of him.

‘Roberto, you never did anything but help me. You saved me time and again. I know that. I’m not blind either.’

She tipped her head forward and buried her face in his neck and the familiar masculine scent of him set her body aching with love for him. If Roberto had betrayed her, he had also saved her, just as he’d saved the Caldarone family and who knows how many others? He was good and decent inside, a fine honest man who was tearing himself apart.

She lifted her head and gently kissed his lips, soothing, murmuring, whispering to him. His arms curled around her and he lovingly pressed his lips to hers. She longed to keep him like this, tight against her body, fused to her, safe from Mussolini’s savage world. She drew him back on to the bed cover, their limbs entwined. The scent of him and the heat of their bodies bound them together, skin to skin, as they peeled off their clothes and he took care not to jolt her damaged hand.

Their loving was leisurely this time, as if they were trying to convince themselves they had all the time in the world to explore each other’s passions and desires. Their hands and lips caressed and lingered, until a moan broke free from his lips as they teased desire to breaking point. Isabella felt her bones grow soft and yearning under his kisses. For this one moment, the city of Rome vanished. Nothing existed outside this room with its bright bedcover in this precious sliver of time. There was just this. Just him and just her, together.

35

Giorgio Andretti was not what Isabella expected. He struck her as only a year or two older than Luigi would have been, probably in his mid-thirties now, but he looked much more. Grey streaked his brown hair and his eyes were sunk deep in a layer of fat as though trying to hide. But his smile was a girl’s smile, soft and uncertain, and Isabella wondered how this man had ever been a Blackshirt.

‘Good morning, Signora Berotti.’

He rose from his red velvet chair in the Caffè Greco with a courtesy that sat awkwardly on his large fleshy figure, his belly as fat and loose as a sow’s.

‘Good morning, Signor Andretti. Thank you for taking the time to see me.’

He chuckled, sending a ripple through his numerous chins, and waved her to the chair opposite him at the small oval marble table. ‘I don’t take the credit, signora. I was given no choice.’

Isabella was startled by his honesty. It made a refreshing change in this maze of lies and deceit that Italians now had to hide behind for their own safety. This wasn’t a man who wanted to pretend that he was something he wasn’t. For the first time she began to believe that here in this elegant café, tucked away on the Via dei Condotti at the bottom of the Spanish steps, she might actually find answers.

‘
Allora
,’ he said, ‘you are Luigi’s pretty widow.’ The small eyes inspected her as she took a seat and he smiled, a genuine smile that made her respond with one of her own. ‘A black widow spider with a serious bite, I suspect,’ he laughed.

‘I can bite,’ she said lightly, ‘when I have to.’

‘And are you on the hunt for someone to bite today?’

‘Of course not. I’m here just to ask a few questions about the work that my husband did with you before he died.’

‘I didn’t think you had come because of my handsome good looks.’

He ran a stubby hand over his lifeless brown hair and laughed at himself, but there was something achingly sad in the gesture.

‘Let’s order some cake and coffee,’ he added. ‘We can’t come to Greco’s and not do so, especially when Pietro Luciani is paying.’ He waved a hand at a waiter and ordered cake for them both, ignoring her ‘Just espresso for me’.

The café was a warren of elegant rooms that flowed into each other through arches, frequented in the past by the likes of Goethe, Byron and Liszt. The walls were covered right up to the ceiling with old oil paintings in gilt frames that gave the place an amber sheen that was oddly relaxing. But Isabella could not afford to relax.

They each waited for the other to make the first move. She kept her voice low, aware of other coffee drinkers around them, and asked politely, ‘What kind of work do you do now?’

‘I work in a factory. Not on the factory floor. I wouldn’t last ten minutes there. I work in the office, buried in ledgers. We make ball bearings.’

‘Useful.’

For the first time his smile grew thin. ‘It doesn’t hurt anybody.’

‘Is that what you did before? With Luigi. Hurt people?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Tell me about it, please. What was it that my husband did that I was too stupid to realise at the time?’

Andretti leaned back in his chair, making it creak dangerously, and took his time lighting a cigarette. When he finally looked at her again, it was through a veil of smoke that turned his skin grey.

‘We were Fascisti, Signora Berotti. We were passionate, Luigi and I. We believed.’ He exhaled a sigh and whispered, ‘We were fools.’

‘As Blackshirts, what did you do in Milan?’

The coffee arrived and Isabella waited with impatience while Andretti scooped up a mouthful of apple cake on his fork. He paused with it hovering on the verge of his lips, looked at her face and reluctantly placed it back on the plate.

‘I eat,’ he said, ‘to bury the person I was back then.’

‘You won’t succeed,’ she said quietly.

‘I know.’

They both sipped their coffee and his eyelids quivered. When he put down his cup, she could see he was ready. Her mouth was suddenly dry.

‘Very well, signora. These are the facts. We all believed in Mussolini. He was going to build a new Italy for us, tossing aside the old decadent ways, ridding us of poverty and corruption, driving out the chaos of nation states that refused to cooperate with each other. Italy would become great again. We were the laughing stock of Europe and he promised us a way to stand tall again.’

Isabella nodded. ‘I know this is what Luigi believed.’

‘So we set about bringing Benito Mussolini to power.’

‘How?’

‘By force.’

He looked longingly down at his cake but kept his fingers away from it. Around them the noise and laughter in the café seemed to fade.

‘Of course Mussolini held meetings to gather the faithful. He is a great orator. But the background work was done by us, the Blackshirts. We
persuaded
,’ he lingered on the word, ‘people to sign up to become members of the Fascist Party. We went into factories where Socialists and Communists – the scum of the earth – were stirring up strikes and we
persuaded
,’ again the emphasis on that word, ‘them to stop.’

‘How did you persuade them?’

‘How do you think?’ He jabbed his cigarette into the onyx ashtray, grinding the life out of it.

‘You used force?’

‘Yes.’

‘Truncheons?’

‘Yes. And worse.’ His gaze rested on her bandage. ‘What happened to your hand?’

‘It had an argument with a gun butt.’

A flush crept up his ivory white neck and spread from chin to chin. He continued quietly, ‘We went into people’s houses, into their shops. We beat anyone who stood against us till they whimpered on the ground for mercy.’

She shuddered. Thinking of Luigi in his fine black uniform that she had admired so blindly. Guilt swept over her, hot and liquid in her stomach, because she knew she had been complicit in her husband’s sins by not asking what she should have been asking. She hung her head, letting her hair sweep forward to hide her shame. Andretti took the opportunity to attack his cake.

‘If you were all “
persuading
” like that,’ she asked after a pool of silence had flowed across their table, ‘why was Luigi the one who was killed? Why was he singled out? And why attack me?’

The apple cake vanished. Just crumbs on a plate.

‘May I?’ he asked, and pointed at her chocolate truffle torte which she hadn’t touched.

She nodded.

‘I don’t know why he was killed,’ he said quickly, reaching for her plate.

‘You’re lying, Signor Andretti.’

He shovelled torte into his mouth, its dark brown crumbs tumbling down the black waistcoat stretched to bursting point across his chest. He didn’t meet her eyes and Isabella knew there was more he was keeping from her.