Imagination.
He thought in pictures from time to time and now that sly, unwanted facility returned with a sharp swiftness, reinforced by the automatic instincts of the detective inside.
She never slept well when he wasn’t home. Some time early in the morning, probably close to dawn, she’d come downstairs to do the washing, only to be met by the flood and the shattered door, a city in chaos.
Pinioned between his grief and his need to understand, Fratelli didn’t dare look at her face. Not yet. He had to think this through. To imagine. To see.
Someone, a passer-by, would notice her. Perhaps he called out for help. For shelter. Chiara would never refuse. If she’d known there was someone in trouble she’d have been the first to offer without a second thought.
This was a back street of Oltrarno. Not Santo Spirito, not quite. No danger here. Not usually. Except when the flood came and reduced this plain and ordinary world to its primal, elemental state.
The cop in him turned her hands in his. Blood beneath the fingernails. Scrapings of skin.
She fought.
‘Of course she fought,’ he murmured.
And what else?
There were two of him now. The first, the husband, imprisoned inside the second, the carabiniere. It was the latter who played the light around the hallway, saw no sign of footprints, only mud and water. This was a murder without precedent. One in which the elements themselves managed to remove all traces of the beast who committed it.
An emotion inside began to work its way to the surface; a choke, a cough, a cry, an arrhythmic tic that joined the two of them, detective and spouse, in bleak and shapeless grief.
The sharp and brutal realization rose in his head and burned there like a flare.
Fourteen hours or more had passed since someone killed his wife here, on the stairs of their home. They would never find him now, not in the sea of mud and muck that was Florence on the fourth of November 1966. He couldn’t even call the station. Summon a car. Do anything but shout and scream to himself, perhaps for hours, for all the long night.
Dead was dead. Gone was gone.
He shone his torch on her face finally and felt all sense of hope and decency leave him; knew that if a man who looked culpable had passed by in that instant, he’d tear him limb from limb and never care about the consequences.
Chiara’s blank and glassy eyes stared upwards towards the rooms that were their home. Her hair was damp and messy, caked in mud, set in hanks, as if her attacker had grabbed her there. Livid bruises marked both sides of her throat where he’d choked the life out of her.
Pino Fratelli, twenty-eight years old, a good man mostly, stared at what he saw and thought of another sight: the astonishing couple in the Brancacci Chapel, Masaccio’s Adam and Eve, newly expelled from Paradise, the woman’s mouth creased and contorted, corners pointing downwards in a shriek of pain.
Chiara looked like this now and it took him a moment to understand why. Then he moved closer and saw. Perhaps it was lipstick. Or something else. A stain, scarlet, smeared across her mouth and lips, as if to make that same expression of agony, a clown-like cry of despair, emphasized by the downturned smear of red at the edge of her mouth.
The husband in him took out a handkerchief from his pocket, dampened it with his tongue and cleaned the shameful smudges from her skin.
His tears fell on her filth-stained cheeks, his hands and the grubby handkerchief fought to clear this muck, this abomination, from her face.
Then he lay there with her, not moving, scarcely daring to breathe. There was no one to summon. No friend, no relative to reach on this strange and unreal night.
Pino Fratelli wept for his dead wife, whispered to her, said meaningless phrases, felt the rational, ordered part of his mind leave him.
Somewhere outside he heard a sound. An impossible one. The ebb and flow of the river, a familiar rhythm, constant and eternal. The ceaseless noise filled his head; the chill, dank waters swamped his imagination. When he closed his eyes he saw Chiara floating to her grave on its filthy surface, like Ophelia borne away by the flood.
It would be daylight, another ten hours, before a local police officer, checking the houses in the street, walked through the half-open door and found him there, still clutching the cold, stiff corpse of his wife on the drenched and dirty stairs. And another seventeen days before Pino Fratelli, finally waking to some kind of consciousness in a sanatorium by the coast outside Livorno, would speak again.
Not that he had much of substance to say.
Wednesday, 5 November 1986
Morning, just after eight in Fiesole. There was a portable TV in the kitchen. Black and white and old. He’d got some fresh eggs from the chickens and made frittata with tomatoes and onions bought from a store in Florence the night before. He got coffee, orange juice, some bread, took it all upstairs, the food on a tray, the TV in his left hand.
The room at the front, where they kept the dope and the guns, was bright in the morning light. Outside he could see lines of puffy grey rain clouds gathering across the watercolour-blue sky. The weather was going to be temperamental for the next few days. He’d heard that on the radio. The coming afternoon threatened a heavy downpour, one that would last for hours, until well after midnight.
Space to think. To plan. Time to flee.
He plugged the little TV into the wall, adjusted the circular wire aerial and played with the tuner. The best he could get was a crackly news channel, the face of the woman reading the bulletin distorted by the weakness of the signal. Her voice was tense and cracked. Clear enough, though.
He turned up the volume all the way and listened, nodding as he took in the details.
They weren’t saying it but the Carabinieri knew nothing beyond the obvious. He wondered if his real name would ever be sufficiently notorious to find its way into the news. If anyone would know it, recognize it, understand who he really was. This seemed unlikely, whatever the outcome. Small people never mattered much in Florence. They were cannon fodder for the whims of their masters, who watched them bleed and die from the walls of their fortress homes.
He’d left half the frittata, cut neatly down the middle through the yellow egg. There was a second cup of coffee going cold and a half-glass of extra orange juice. He hadn’t been in the other room since the night before. Something there frightened him. Was too close, too real.
Still, it had to be faced.
He unplugged the set, picked up the tray and walked in. Then he bent down to a power socket on the wall, got the TV going again, turned down the volume a touch and placed the food and drink on the bed. Got the saucepan he’d left by the bed the day before, walked it to the bathroom, emptied it, washed it like a servant.
Left it there and came back.
The signal was better near the back window. The TV newscast was still running. You’d think they had nothing else to talk about. Same old story, same old empty words, going round and round. One dead, that was all. So what?
She was watching, rapt. Couldn’t take her eyes off the thing.
Finally he turned and looked at the bed and said, ‘I did it for you.’
She was still tethered loosely to the iron posts, half naked beneath the coverlet.
‘For your honour,’ he insisted.
Her long curly hair was getting greasy. As he watched, it moved, and her face, sour and bossy, turned on him. Chavah Efron said, no warmth, no gratitude in her hard voice, ‘You can’t just leave me in here for hours on end.’