A Season for the Dead

Forty-Eight

Costa rang the doorbell of the apartment. It was on the fourth floor of a modern block a couple of miles from the airport, just off the main road. You could hear the traffic constantly but it was still better than he’d expected. In the few days he’d known Rossi he’d built up a mental image of what the man was like beyond work: unkempt, disorganized, solitary. He thought he’d be living in some dump closer to town. Instead, here was this neat apartment block with geraniums on the staircases and the smell of home-cooking floating out of the windows of the adjoining homes.

He wished he’d noticed more about the man. Teresa Lupo had seen something else there. His own detachment had prevented his noticing, though he couldn’t help but ask himself whether this was what Rossi really wanted.

A slender middle-aged woman in a plain blue blouse and black skirt came to the door. Her hair was graying and cut severely short. She stared at him through a pair of black-rimmed glasses. He didn’t feel welcome.

“I’m from the station. I was Luca’s partner.”

“Really?”

“I came to say…” She didn’t look as if she’d been crying. If anything, she was full of fury. “… how sorry we all are. We’ll do what we can.”

“Too late for that, isn’t it? Hell, I’m not his sister. Come in.”

She threw open the door and he followed her along a hall decorated with paintings of flowers. It led into a sunny living room. In the corner, seated in a plain wooden chair, was a stocky woman in her early thirties. She was dressed in a nylon housecoat. Her face was pale and flabby, recognizably similar to Rossi’s. She had long black hair flowing down her back and shoulders, like a schoolgirl’s.

The woman looked at him as he entered, opened her mouth and made an unintelligible noise. It sounded like the moan of a wounded animal.

“Nic Costa,” he said, extending a hand. “I worked with Luca.”

She made the noise again, only this time it was more prolonged, more agonized.

“Maria’s deaf and dumb,” the older woman told him. “I’m her care worker. I used to spend time here when Luca couldn’t cope.”

She turned to Maria Rossi and began signing with a quick, ready fluency.

“I didn’t know,” Costa said. “I didn’t even know he had a sister. I can’t believe we never got around to talking about it.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” she replied, and began signing again. The woman in the chair nodded and smiled up at him. “That was Luca for you. I offered your condolences, by the way. I made some small talk.”

“Thanks.” He had no idea what to ask, what to offer. “How bad is she?”

“How bad does deaf and dumb get?” the woman snapped. Then she cursed herself and went to the window for a moment, staring out at the motorway. “I’m sorry. Don’t take it personally. I’ve been working with Maria for five years. Ever since Luca took her out of the home to try and look after her himself. After a while I came to realize you don’t just end up caring for one person. It’s both of them, and lately, to be honest, it was him. He was a complicated man. A good man. Not that it ever made him happy.”

“Why didn’t he tell me? I wouldn’t have let him work all those hours. Last night…” He couldn’t say it. Rossi’s presence in the Piazza Navona had been coincidence. Falcone could have sent any of them on the same job. No one was to blame except the man who killed him.

“What do you think?” she asked. “That he was ashamed of her?”

“No.” That was impossible. “Perhaps in some way he was ashamed of himself, for not being able to make things better. I only got to know him recently. There was something… Luca wasn’t happy inside his own skin. Maybe that’s part of the job.”

She studied him, seeming to approve of his answers, then went over to Maria, sat down next to her, smiling, and put an arm around her shoulders. “I think you’re right. He told me one time he kept waking up in a fury, mad that he couldn’t do anything else for her.”

A flurry of signs brought a brief smile from Rossi’s sister and then half a sob.

“She can’t lip-read. Always found it too difficult. It means it’s easy for me to lie.”

Costa scribbled out his home phone number. “If she needs anything, call me anytime. The department can help with money. There’s a pension. I know it’s no comfort now, but tell me what she needs and I’ll see to it.”

The woman looked at the piece of paper and sighed. “She needs her brother back.”

Costa stiffened. The woman closed her eyes, ashamed of herself.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “There’s nothing you can do. Maria can’t look after herself. She has to go back in the home. That’s the only place she can get full-time care.”

He understood how Rossi felt.

“It’s okay,” the woman continued. “She has friends there. She used to visit anyway. It’s just…” She had to stop until she could continue. “She’ll miss him. We all will.”

“I know.”

He looked at the small, tidy apartment. There were images of flowers everywhere.

“They’re Maria’s,” she said, noticing his interest. “It’s what she does. She’s deaf and dumb. She’s not stupid. Nor was he.”

Costa walked over and looked at a small oil painting of a single hyacinth bloom: vivid blue hues against a yellow background. She’d seen Van Gogh. The work was full of life and happiness. She’d found something that eluded her brother and had, perhaps, fought to share it with him.

“If you want,” the woman said, “I can show you his room. Perhaps there’s something there you’d like. To remind you of him. A photograph. He had a lot of stuff.”

“I didn’t know him that well. But I know someone who’d appreciate it.”

She led him down the corridor. Rossi’s bedroom was small and looked out of the back onto a car park. The dead smell of stale cigarettes hung in the air. There was a single bed, neatly made, a desk with a few tidied papers, an office diary and a swan-neck lamp. A corkboard on the wall was covered in little yellow notes and photographs. Costa looked at them. They were dates for outings: trips to the sea at Ostia, meetings at the hospital, coach tours into the country. His sister was in every last photograph, on the beach, at a fancy-dress party, eating at a country restaurant, smiling throughout. Luca made her happy. That had been his gift.

There was only one photo with Rossi in it. Brother and sister were seated in a long open-topped Bugatti 57 in a vintage-car museum somewhere. Rossi had his hands on the steering wheel. Maria laughed from the passenger seat. He looked like a different man, someone in control of himself.

“That was before he had the breakdown,” the woman explained.

“He looks happy.”

“Don’t be fooled,” she answered with a bitter laugh. “He was always on the brink, to be honest. For as long as I knew him.”

He touched the photograph. “I can’t take this. It belongs to her. It’s too precious.”

“It’s my photograph. I was on the trip. I can get another made. Take it.” She looked around the little room. “He hated me coming in here. It was his secret place, I think. Somewhere he liked to hide sometimes. Still had to be cleaned, though. I’ll leave you for a while.”

She walked out, closing the door. Nic Costa sat at the small, neat desk and looked out of the window, out at the rows of cars and the apartment blocks running away from the motorway. This was a life he could never have associated with Luca Rossi: an ordered existence with responsibilities no one in the department could have guessed at.

He opened the desk diary and immediately felt guilty, ashamed. It was apparent from the moment he looked at the page that this was where Rossi put the other side of himself: the black and gloomy side that always threatened to lead him to the edge. The writing was unbalanced: sloping and too small. There were doodles, tiny scribbles that could have been the faces of demons. And a small line of doggerel, one Costa knew by heart…

As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives.

He read more. This was the private place where Rossi took his inner fears for a walk and everyone was in there: Falcone, Teresa Lupo, Sara, everyone. No one was spared. No small detail went unrecorded.

No wonder Rossi kept the care worker out of the room.

Costa read two more pages, then tucked the diary under his jacket, went back into the living room, said a polite, terse good-bye and was gone.