The Italian Wife

  ‘Thank you,’ he muttered to Roberto. ‘Grazie.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For helping my daughter. She told me about you and the architect.’

  ‘That’s not why I’m here.’

  ‘I know, fotografo. So what are you really doing, falling over my footprints?’

  ‘I came to find you.’

  The man nodded and the knife reappeared in his hand. ‘Why?’

  ‘What do you know about Luigi Berotti’s death?’

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘His widow.’

  ‘His widow?’ The blue eyes settled with a flicker of surprise on Roberto, on the bootlace of blood at his throat. ‘I thought she was dead.’

  ‘You thought wrong.’

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘Not to her.’

  Abruptly the man’s eyes blazed. ‘It’s a fight for freedom. For the freedom of Italy itself. Can’t you see that? Some people get hurt. It is a necessary sacrifice of the weak.’

  Roberto had an urge to rip his tongue out. ‘She was innocent, damn you!’

  ‘No one is innocent. Everyone must choose. She chose a Blackshirt.’

  The truth of the statement hit Roberto in the gut. It was the slippery thought that came to stalk him in the middle of the night and slid uninvited into his mind when he touched Isabella’s creamy skin or watched the way she would throw him a smile with a little toss of her head. As if to say, See, I remember how to laugh. I haven’t lost that.

  She chose a Blackshirt.

  ‘She was young,’ he said.

  ‘That is no excuse. We were all young and we all made our choices.’

  Roberto could hear the righteous fury, the conviction that everything was to be sacrificed to the cause. Everything and everyone.

  ‘Did you pull the trigger on the bullet that killed Luigi Berotti?’ he demanded.

  The man started to raise the knife. A warning. ‘It doesn’t matter who pulled the trigger. The destruction of Mussolini’s brutal Fascist regime is the final goal. That’s what matters.’

  His eyes were shining with blind fervour. Roberto could feel it rising like heat from him. This was why he was so dangerous. This man saw one path ahead, only one, as straight as an arrow, and he would trample to dust the flesh and blood of anyone who stepped in his way. Is that what Isabella had unwittingly done in Milan? Did she blunder into his path that day?

  ‘It is because of you that your daughter is chained up. Yet you leave her.’

  ‘That’s none of your business. Stay out of it. I will return for Rosa when the time is right.’

  ‘Take her now. This may be your only chance and the child is lonely. She has lost her mother.’

  It was the wrong thing to say. Instantly the eyes narrowed and the knife shot out so that the point of the blade pinned itself to the tip of Roberto’s jaw.

  ‘What is it you want from me, fotografo?’ The question came out as a low hiss.

  ‘I want you to speak to Signora Berotti.’

  ‘Why should I do that?’

  ‘Because if you do, I will make sure that Rosa is properly cared for if you don’t come back.’

  The man’s mouth spasmed.

  ‘A life for a life,’ Roberto stated flatly, as if he were striking a bargain for the sale of horsemeat. ‘Isabella Berotti lost her life because of you. Every night she relives that moment in the marketplace, minute by minute.’ He raised his hand and firmly pushed the blade to one side. ‘Speak to her. Give her back her life.’

  The blue eyes grew cloudy and for the first time uncertain. ‘How do I know I can trust you?’

  ‘You are a man accustomed to taking risks. Speak to Isabella Berotti. Then – and only then – I will swear to see that your daughter will be cared for in a decent place. If you fail to return.’

  He saw the man’s gaze roam up to the upper floor’s windows.

  ‘A life for a life,’ Roberto murmured again.

  The blond head nodded once. Sharp and decisive.

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘And let me tell you this, father of Rosa. Next time you put a knife to my throat I will break your arm.’

  The man gave a low private chuckle and slid the knife into a leather sheath inside his jacket. ‘To seal our bond, fotografo, I will save your life. A life for a life, that’s what you said.’ He fixed his eyes on Roberto’s face.

  ‘What the hell do you mean?’ Roberto demanded.

  ‘Don’t go to the rally. Don’t go to listen to Mussolini.’

  ‘I am employed to photograph the occasion.’

  The man gave the faintest of shrugs. ‘Then die.’

  Roberto froze. It took three seconds for the reality to hit him. He spun around and raced towards the high stone wall. His heart kicking hard enough to crack a rib. Inside his head he was screaming, Isabella.

  25

  Where was she?

  Where?

  Roberto’s fleeting flicker of hope that he could find her fast was snuffed out the moment he set foot inside the rally arena. A heaving swarm of dark heads and thousands of excited faces were creating a low buzz that sounded like a million bees.

  The field was a mass of colour. Flags and bunting were reaching out on the breeze, fluttering fretfully above bright Sunday-best dresses and flower-trimmed hats. The men presented a more sombre spectacle in their caps and jackets of greys and browns, the drabber of the species, but they were the ones who crowded closest around the central stage, elbowing their way to the front.

  It was impossible to find her.

  Fear slid as thick as oil down his throat and he kept telling himself that she might not be here, might be safe somewhere else. As he forced his way past a stall selling salami pizzas, the smell of tomatoes and garlic cooking almost convinced him that he was being a fool. That nothing would happen. How could there be danger in a place where something as normal as tomatoes and garlic were being prepared for a meal? Or where a chicken turned on a spit and a cauldron of pork and peppers simmered temptingly on a stove? Piles of fresh bread were heaped high and people were biting into the soft warm dough, a normal peaceful day.

  Nothing could happen. Not here under a clear sheet of sapphire sky where even the birds seemed to be rising on thermals of excitement. This was a town that was trying its best to appear normal, to go about its business with a wide confident smile, yet behind the smile it was anything but normal. Roberto could feel the ripples under his feet – the uncertainty, the disquiet, the strangeness. As unstable and treacherous as the marshes it was built on.

  He worked systematically. Slicing through the crowds in long straight rows, the way he’d taught Alessandro to drive his furrows across the field. He started from the back and worked his way forward towards the stage that looked gaudy in red, white and green flags, draped in readiness for Il Duce’s arrival.

  ‘Roberto!’

  He turned quickly, but it was only one of the cameramen from LUCE.

  ‘Here, Roberto, you’ll be needing this. Mussolini is due any moment.’

  ‘Grazie, Alfredo.’

  The plump man with bad acne scars shifted the Graflex camera equipment case from his own shoulder to Roberto’s and vanished back into the crowd, trailing electric cables and light meters. The energy was growing. Voices grew louder. A band struck up with a marching song and the press of bodies around the stage became ever denser, as if the populace of Bellina were trying to force itself into one solid mass with but one thought in its head: Il Duce.

  Where are you, Isabella?

  He searched for her vibrant face among faces that were drab, for hair that was long and wild, for a distinctive walk with a limp, for a neck held straight and erect. He moved fast, shouldering a path through the crush, using his height to look over heads.

  There!

  His heart hammered. A green dress. Her back to him, and her hair wound in a braid at the nape of her slender neck. He swung to his left to cut across to her but at that moment the b
and struck up with a deafening rendition of ‘Giovinezza’ and a long maroon Alfa Romeo swept across the field, sleek as a leopard.

  ‘Isabella!’ Roberta shouted at the top of his lungs, bellowing like a bull, barging aside the people in between him and the green dress.

  She turned. It wasn’t her. Roberto felt a jolt of disappointment, absurdly angry at the woman for not being Isabella. Applause exploded through the crowd and Roberto knew that Mussolini had stepped out of the car. He should be there, Graflex in hand, doing the job he was paid for. That was the deal with Grassi. But right now the only thought in Roberto’s head was to find Isabella and get her off this rally field immediately.

  The speeches started, effusive tinny words flying out of the loudspeakers positioned throughout the crowd, but Roberto paid little heed. Even when Il Duce himself strutted up to the microphone and launched into one of his usual harangues as a forest of arms rose in the Fascist salute. Still Roberto furiously carved his furrows.

  ‘It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue.’ Mussolini’s words from the platform boomed out across the citizens of Bellina. ‘It is the State which gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity.’

  Roberto moved more carefully.

  Blackshirts were mingling with the crowd, watching faces, eyeing any bulges in jackets, suspicion bristling with every black-booted step they took. Roberto eased himself away from them and in doing so caught the flash of a profile. A line of cheek. It drew him in the direction of the platform. For the first time he glanced up and saw Mussolini in his familiar grandiose stance, chest out, head back and chin jutting forward at his audience, for all the world like the statue of a Roman emperor. He was clad in a black uniform and its message was not lost on the crowd.

  ‘The time for Italy is now!’

  Roars of approval greeted his words.

  ‘On this Agro Pontino we will wage the great Battle for Grain.’

  Another roar. Hands shot skywards. Roberto used the moment to force his shoulder towards the spot where he had seen the delicate line of cheek but it had vanished. His head twisted and turned, frustration making his movements rough when others sought to bar his way.

  ‘Believe, people of Bellina!’ the loudspeaker crackled above his head.

  The crowds swayed forward, chanting their allegiance, ‘Il Duce! Il Duce!’ And in the moment in which they drew their collective breath, Roberto heard something, a sound he didn’t expect to hear. A familiar Gipsy four-cylinder engine. A low-pitched distinctive growl.

  ‘Obey, people of Bellina!’ Mussolini declared.

  Roberto caught sight of a face only a few paces ahead right near the stage and instantly he recognised it.

  ‘Fight, people of Bellina!’

  He surged towards it, brushing aside those in his way, because it was Isabella’s escort at the dinner last night, the construction manager with the look of a man whose fight is against himself. Roberto seized his slight shoulder. As he did so, the sound of the engine came again, louder this time. Nearer. Above them. Roberto let his eyes flick up and picked out a small light aircraft that was glinting like a sword-tip in the sunshine and approaching fast.

  ‘Do you know where Signora…?’

  But at that same second he saw her because she heard his voice and turned to smile at him. She was standing on the far side of the construction manager, half hidden behind a towering Blackshirt who had also turned at the sound of someone not attending spellbound to Mussolini’s speech. Roberto side-stepped the two men and took hold of Isabella’s wrist. She looked surprised. But she also looked different. There was something dark and cloudy at the back of her blue eyes that hadn’t been there yesterday and he noticed the pale scarf she was wearing to conceal the bruising on her neck. He could sense a new tension in her as he moved closer.

  ‘Isabella, come with me.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes, right now.’

  Something about the way he said it unsettled her. She swung her head around, searching for danger. She saw none, but gripped his hand.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked quickly.

  ‘Anywhere but here.’

  Her eyes flared with alarm but she had the sense not to ask questions, not here where a hundred ears could be listening. The blare of the loudspeakers ceased briefly as Mussolini drew breath and surveyed the thousands of Fascist salutes with grim satisfaction. Roberto took that moment to edge away from the group Isabella was with and he drew her with him.

  ‘Isabella?’

  It was that colleague of hers, the one who looked at her with more than professional interest.

  ‘It’s an emergency, Davide. I have to leave.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes, now.’

  ‘Don’t. It’s not wise.’

  He reached out to hold her in place but she slid behind the broad backside of a toothless grandmother who was displaying a rictus grin of rapture for the benefit of the prowling Blackshirts. Isabella escaped.

  To hell with it. Thousands of people. Too little space. Bodies jammed together. Attached to Isabella, Roberto’s progress slowed, squeezing the two of them through gaps too small for one. Tempers flared. A punch was thrown in his ribs but he ploughed relentlessly on and nothing would make him release his grip on her hand.

  All the time the engine’s growl grew louder. Heads were starting to lift, eyes raking the empty sky until they found the tiny aircraft streaking directly in line with the field. Roberto didn’t waste time looking up. He knew exactly what it was they were up against from his one earlier glance. A Caproni, the two-seater biplane nicknamed the Caproncino because it was so small. But big enough to create a blazing inferno. If it crashed.

  ‘Roberto,’ Isabella’s voice scarcely made it to him over a burst of applause, ‘what is —’

  ‘Halt!’ Two burly Blackshirts with swarthy faces and matching moustaches stepped in front of Roberto, truncheons already in their fists. One placed the tip of it in the centre of Roberto’s chest and leaned his weight into it. ‘Where do you think you are going? It is a betrayal of Il Duce. Get back to…’

  Roberto knew the point had come that made him fear for Isabella. He brandished his camera case at the Blackshirts.

  ‘Step aside,’ he snapped. ‘Pronto! I am the official photographer appointed by Chairman Grassi and I must return to my car to fetch more film for Il Duce’s departure.’ He could hear the Caproncino. So close. Circling now.

  ‘No, no one leaves. You remain here.’

  Roberto looked at Isabella’s face. ‘Let the signora go to fetch it,’ he said sternly. ‘She is my —’

  ‘— wife,’ Isabella stated, and clutched at the arm of one of the Blackshirts, stumbling as if in pain. He tried to pull away from her but she hung on and whimpered at him, ‘I’m pregnant. Help me. Per favore. I’m bleeding…’

  The Blackshirt recoiled with an expression of disgust and this time she let him go. ‘Get out of here,’ he ordered smartly and, using his truncheon freely on the throng of bodies, he carved a path for their exit.

  ‘Grazie,’ Isabella murmured.

  ‘Run!’ Roberto hissed at her.

  The crowd was thinning here. They moved faster. Blackshirts were staring up into the sky as the aeroplane climbed higher and higher above the field, a tiny leaf spiralling up into the blue. He saw Isabella look up as she ran and for the first time register where the noise was coming from. The plane flipped over high above and Isabella’s jaw dropped open as it dawned on her what was about to happen.

  She jerked to a halt.

  ‘No, Isabella!’

  Roberto forced her forward but she dug her heels into the ground with a strength that surprised him and wrenched herself out of his grip. She started to push her way back into the crowd.

  ‘No, Isabella, don’t. It’s too late.’

  She turned to him, her face twisted in anguish. ‘No,’ she whispered, shaking her head, ‘no, no, don’t say that. It’s not
too late to warn —’

  The plane came screeching out of the sky. Nose first, it roared vertically downward straight as an arrow, tearing through the flimsy layers of air above the spectators’ heads. Rushing at its target – the square platform that flaunted its presence with the boastful red, white and green flags. And at the black and gold banner that declared the Fascist grip on the rally.

  The stampede started. Roberto knew it was coming, he could sense their fear in the air before they knew it themselves. He was already loping towards the perimeter of the field, his arm clamped around Isabella, pinning her to him. Her feet scarcely touched the ground and he could feel her heart pounding as thousands of feet came storming across the field behind them. A wild panic sent people charging from the aeroplane’s path, screams and cries lacerating the air.