Two Women in Rome Page 16

  ‘I did.’

  ‘If it had been on display, our EK might have seen it and copied the style.’

  The exchange faltered.

  She drank her coffee. ‘Gabriele, did you know from the beginning that The Annunciation was not genuine?’

  There was a startled silence before he replied. ‘An instinct may be powerful but it’s not always correct. Everything should be investigated.’ He frowned. ‘You’re doubtful.’

  ‘I wondered if you’ve been straight with me.’

  ‘Did you?’ There was a flash of anger. ‘You will understand as well as I that assumptions must be challenged and I could not be sure until the investigations were done.’

  Did she believe him? She did not know him well enough to make the judgement.

  Gabriele pushed aside his cup. ‘Are you still working through those papers?’

  ‘Almost completed.’

  ‘I wondered about her. Her death.’

  ‘Which was awful.’

  ‘Yes, it was.’

  He was almost inaudible and her antennae sharpened. ‘Do you know anything about Nina Lawrence?’

  He placed a fingertip on the illustration from The Determined Traveller. ‘Only that she was murdered.’

  ‘It’s strange how no one claimed her. And why the virtually secret burial?’ Gabriele’s expression was blank and she sensed he had withdrawn into himself. ‘Yet there’s an inscription on her gravestone. Someone must have organised that.’

  Gabriele picked up a small pot of paint and turned it round and round.

  ‘If you did know anything about her,’ Lottie went carefully, ‘I would like to know. I would like to honour her—’

  ‘The Espatriati is a good archive,’ he cut her off, ‘with plenty of space. That’s a kind of honour.’

  At the doorway, she turned back. ‘You couldn’t explain to me why Bishop Dino Battista, a Roman Catholic, would have been at her burial? Is that customary?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ he replied.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Rome

  20 April 1978

  IWAS WORKING ON THE ARTICLE ON NARCISSI WHEN THERE WAS a knock on the door.

  I ignored it.

  The plant derives its name from the narcotic quality of its scent – narce, which effected numbness and made the senses swoon – and not after the self-absorbed Narcissus, and that probably accounts for the tradition that says narcissus scent is harmful.

  The narcissus is one of the flowers longest associated with men. Centuries before Homer, flowers of the species were used by Egyptians in their tombs. The Greek Furies wore narcissi in their tangled locks, the scent of which stupefied those they were punishing.

  Second time, the knock was impatient.

  I knew who it would be.

  I hated to be interrupted when I was working on an article or illustration, but it was no surprise when Signora Marta Livardo, caretaker, nuisance and enemy, took the silence as permission to barge into my room without an invitation.

  On this, she had form. Still a youngish woman, but bossy and nosy, she was never seen without an ostentatious gold cross around her neck. A woman of contradictions? She shouts at her husband with language that would make a sailor blush (he gives as good as he gets), but the flamboyant cross suggests devoutness.

  She was stopped in her tracks when I confronted her and blustered that she had heard a cry and came to see if all was well.

  Her eyes darted around busily. Snaffling up information. The clutter of paint pots. The botanical drawing I had been working on. A pile of clothes on the chair that I had thought about ironing but had not got further than the consideration.

  She dislikes me very much – as much as I dislike her – but, agog to know what I get up to, frequently buttonholes me on some pretence or other. I suspect she has a second key to my rooms and snoops around.

  I am careful. As I should be. Leaving the indicators in place. Hiding my journal and papers in the cache under the bath that the men from The Office constructed when I moved in.

  She wanted to know if I would be going away again. I asked why she needed to know and she replied she was obliged by the landlord to keep her records up to date.

  I heard her walking back down the passage, her rubber-soled lace-up shoes emitting little squeaks, and I smiled. At least the two of us know where we are. It’s a straightforward, honest situation of mutual distrust.

  Many wild species of the narcissi are to be found around the Mediterranean, especially around the Iberian Peninsula, but not exclusively.

  The Mediterranean littoral is heart-stoppingly beautiful. Powdery shape-shifting sand. Hard stony beaches. Patches of red, ochre and yellow. The glitter of the sea. A sea that can turn sullen and menacing. The heat at midday. The darkness of the night sea.

  I ached to return. I don’t know why this should be, as I come from a different place.

  Narcissi …?

  For convenience, they can be divided into half a dozen major and some minor sections …

  Not too scholarly … I checked myself. The dullards at the mag’s HQ might miss the embedded messages. Not that I mind leading them a dance. Quite the reverse – but it wasn’t professional.

  I rounded off the narcissi article with a quotation from the herbalist Gerard, who explained that Sophocles named the narcissus ‘the garland of the great infernal goddess, because they that are departed and dulled with death, should worthily be crowned with a dulling flower’.

  The next stage was always fun – obtaining the illustrations to go with the article. Back at The Determined Traveller’s HQ no one has a clue and, if I don’t do it for them, they usually choose something witless.

  So I ‘find’ it.

  I packed it up and sent it on its way by the usual route.

  22 April 1978

  YESTERDAY, REX ISSUED ME WITH INSTRUCTIONS.

  The Red Brigades have – allegedly – shot a prison warder in Milan and published a seventh communiqué declaring that Aldo Moro is alive and they are ready to swap him for communist prisoners. They have also issued an ultimatum that if this has not taken place by today Moro will be executed.

  Whatever you think of Moro, it is appalling. To be held captive, knowing a death sentence has been passed, must be excruciating. Even the toughest of men, and Moro is tough, must be reduced to terror and anger, knowing that the police are not doing the best job at finding him. Even worse, his political colleagues are being slow to act.

  Rex and I discussed the stage management by the RB, who proclaim hostility to the press but use it to trickle information out to the public.

  Amnesty International has appealed to the Red Brigades.

  Rex ordered me to contact our military friend, who we suspect has insider details about the kidnapping, and offer him the usual frills.

  Does he ever think about what ‘the usual frills’ entail? I wondered. Has he ever endured the boredom, the hot breath, the distasteful aftermath? Well fed, glossy, impatient for results as Rex is, I suspected not.

  The mark of an adult is to accept and absorb the distasteful and unwanted during their existence. No life is ever free of either.

  Discuss.

  He was anxious that I understood what was to be done. Obediently, I parroted back at him that I was to make contact with the general as soon as possible.

  When we said goodbye, Rex told me to take the utmost care, something he had never done before.

  Was I affronted by the warning? No, Rex was anxious, which was an indicator as to how tricky things had become.

  I had my persona and it was a convincing one. Landscape gardeners stick to vistas and contours, bulbs and blossom. Their arena is not political. ‘I’m a garden designer who’s good at her job,’ I say sweetly and earnestly. (The earnestness is crucial because it makes me look a little stupid.) ‘Nothing more.’

  The real danger came from a different quarter, but Rex was ignorant of that.

  Yet, on reflection, I have concluded
that I was wrong. Gardening does have its political dimensions.

  Writing, thinking, being the gardener is to understand that the power of the harmonious garden dwindles if an alliance is not made between death and decay and new life. If he or she is a true gardener, they must understand that the secret activity under the surface is as significant as the theatre of plants above.

  28 April 1978

  MORO IS STILL ALIVE AND THE RB ISSUE THEIR EIGHTH communiqué demanding the release of thirteen Red Brigades prisoners in exchange for him.

  As instructed, I went into the field.

  The Palacrinos live their lives in a permanent state of astonishment, lamenting the fact they are neither as rich as they think they should be nor as well looked after as they think they are entitled to be. But they possess superb taste in gardening, which I know exactly how to satisfy.

  The planting of the box hedges and the scrub oaks and, beyond them, the pines had been completed. The vista I had planned was now assembling. They insisted that a dinner was held to celebrate that the bones of the garden were in place. It dovetailed nicely.

  We ate in the room overlooking the valley, with the mountain in the distance. As a setting, it could not be bettered but it was a long way from the kitchen, giving the staff no end of trouble. The table was laid with silver and white napery and lit with candles in crystal candelabra.

  We were ten in all.

  ‘Dear Signorina Lawrence … Nina …’ Paola Palacrino raised her glass to me at her end of the table. ‘We hope that you will design many more gardens, but we think that there will never be one as beautiful as this one is going to be.’

  She raised her glass and the other guests toasted me. If I had not disliked their politics heartily, I might have been touched.

  I had been placed next to the general, a chore for which I had prepared myself, wearing the black dress that left my shoulders bare.

  He was exactly as before: puffed up and gleeful at how closely he was embedded into the powers running the country. In a way, I understood. To be close to the epicentre is addictive.

  We discussed the Moro kidnapping. Of course. He told me how the house-to-house searches were increasing, and roadblocks were springing up. He said there was no question that the left-wing terrorists would be trapped in the end and punished.

  God help them.

  He knew more than he was telling me but, because he was vain, he could not resist dropping a hint or two to keep my interest piqued.

  My training kicked in and I knuckled down to my task.

  However, later, in bed with him, I was forced to grit my teeth. It took all my resolution not to throw him off me. His smell, his laugh, his ludicrous self-regard.

  I never allowed myself to think about Leo while it was in train because that would have been a kind of blasphemy. It would have spoilt everything that was good and true about him and me.

  The general’s defences lowered, his talk was less guarded, bordering on the careless. He let drop that Moro had packed the documents of ‘historical compromise’ (the ones with which he was going to face the Italian Parliament) into the car from which he had been kidnapped.

  (Discussing it with Rex when I returned to Rome, we picked that one apart. How had the general got hold of this detail, which had not been released?)

  Not even the Pope was able to help, he told me when I began work on him again.

  Surely it wasn’t in His Holiness’s bailiwick, I said, and waited for a moment before asking him who he thought had done it.

  He was enjoying himself too much to answer immediately, then muttered that the Red Brigades were claiming the honours but I should not take everything at face value.

  No I won’t, you old goat, I thought.

  In an offhand way, I remarked that the Red Brigades weren’t as clever as they thought they were and the general said that most zealots were blind before ordering me sharply to continue what I was doing.

  I decided to bide my time and to only ask follow-up questions when he was at maximum vulnerability. Instead, I murmured that, whoever they were, they were brave.

  He muttered something that sounded like … ‘Gladiators’ training’.

  I paid special attention to the spot that made him almost shriek with pleasure.

  Afterwards, we lay quiet. He heaved over towards me and said he had not had such a good evening since he visited a well-known nightclub in America.

  I told him I longed to visit the US. I let a second elapse before murmuring that I believed it was very anti-communist over there.

  ‘Sí.’ He was drowsy but not too drowsy to explain how the US opposed Communist governments anywhere in Europe and how many people in Italy approved.

  I closed my eyes.

  Later, Rex and I go over what we know.

  Multiple suggestions, to be verified, that armed opposition to the left wing in Italy is directed by the CIA. Members of the Italian government working with them.

  Their mission: to sabotage any gains made by the left wing and to create an Italian Nationalism capable of halting any slide to the left.

  The methods: to organise terrorism and blame it on the Communists. Spread fear and pass restrictive laws.

  Strong possibility that the kidnapping of Moro was, in fact, orchestrated by CIA operatives who have infiltrated the Red Brigades.

  Before he fell into satiated sleep, the general murmured that I should bloody well remember there was no proof of any of it.

  I went on the alert, sensing that, when he roused from his stupor, he would register that I had been asking questions.

  He snored away beside me and I considered Moro’s possible fate.

  Was he resigned? Fearful? During his captivity, he must have thought of his wife and children. Did he regret trying to bring together political factions? I hoped he had the energy to achieve some tranquillity of spirit. There can be no greater tragedy, I think, than going to your death unresolved.

  When the general woke, he seemed surprised to see me still occupying the bed. I could have gone but I calculated taking flight might have made him additionally suspicious. He was as sour as a lemon. Draping an arm across my breasts, he told me I was a small girl with a large curiosity.

  The hint of danger brushed cool air over my flesh.

  I slipped out from under him and reached for my clothes. I told him that last night had been very special and he must go back to sleep.

  It was early and nothing stirred as I returned to my bedroom. I shut the door and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  I was bereft.

  I yearned for Leo and counted the months since I had seen him. Six, seven, eight, nine … Each one heavier to live through than the last. I thought about everything that was good, bad, maddening and wonderful about him.

  I wondered if he yearned for me.

  Time flows at different speeds in different places. The night with the general had been achingly long. My night with Leo – our night – fled in the time it took for him to run his fingers wonderingly down my body.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  READING THAT ENTRY MADE LOTTIE CRY BECAUSE SHE KNEW how it all ended.

  Paul – who else? – helped Lottie to track down Bishop, now Cardinal, Dino Battista at San Pietro, a retirement home for priests, in the Trastevere.

  ‘It’s run by an organisation within the Catholic infrastructure,’ he told her. ‘A sort of Catholic freemasonry. They’re a world to themselves.’

  She looked it up. Not everyone approved of this particular movement which had a reputation for elitism and secrecy but many did. It espoused modern management methods with conservative ideology and ran its own university and college for student priests in Rome.

  Cardinal Dino’s biography revealed he had worked for a time in the Curia, which was the government of the Holy See, supervising Church works in the Roman districts and was familiar with all aspects of the Curia’s administration.

  ‘Why would a Catholic bishop have participated in Nina’s burial?
’ she asked.

  Paul had no more idea than Gabriele Ricci. ‘It’s unusual, I would think, but not unheard of. Maybe there was a personal connection. Or he heard about the murder and felt it would be a charitable act.’

  This was a game of grandmother’s footsteps. One step forward, two back. Thinking it over, Lottie realised that Tom had been clever to spot that she had been ensnared by its sly compulsion.

  It had taken several phone calls to firm up the appointment, and she reflected ruefully that she still had to learn a thing or two about putting her hands on the right levers.

  Her choice of clothes needed to be judicious and she unearthed a long-sleeved blouse and a full skirt. Since she was planning to walk, she added flat shoes, a hat and a shoulder bag.

  Halfway across the Ponte Sisto, she halted and looked down to the towpath where the dying Nina had been discovered. A few people – tourists, at a guess – strolled along it. A couple of booths selling drinks had been erected and birds surfed the water.

  Having crossed into the Trastevere, she navigated her way to the Carmelite monastery of Santa Maria delle Scala. Old and austerely beautiful, the retirement home stood next to the church, surrounded by a businesslike wall.

  Entering via a gate set into the wall, she found herself in a medieval cloister planted up with herbs and lavender. The bees were busy, their humming loud in the quiet. Two grey-clad nuns with string bags stuffed with vegetables glided around its perimeter.

  No one here would ever break into a run, or shout. There was no need, for a powerful organisational presence was embedded into every stone, every sprig of sage.

  The porter ushered Lottie into the visitors’ area, a thickly whitewashed room in which a few chairs had been placed. She knew better than to expect to be taken any further into the building.

  She studied the pamphlet set out on a table, which stated the objective of the home was to ensure the comfort of elderly priests in the final stages of their lives.