‘That’s the male,’ said Patrick, pointing as one of the birds hovered briefly before darting away in search of fresh building material. ‘The one with blue wings.’
‘Yes,’ said Francesca. The birds set her on edge. She had never been that free, to wing effortlessly in unencumbered air, to turn feathers into light, to be the hunter, not the hunted. ‘They come here every year,’ she said. ‘They build a nest and hatch their chicks and fly away again.’
She wished she could just flap a pair of wings and fly away with a kestrel’s ease, away from Rome, from Italy, from the past.
‘How did you find me?’ he asked. ‘How did you come to follow me in Venice, the night I visited your father?’
She smiled. Not her old smile, he thought. That had gone forever. But another very much like it, wry, enigmatic - not in the manner of the Gioconda, but darker, as though it were not a smile at all but a mask embellishing fear. Fear, great sadness, longings that had grown stale and useless - motifs for an entire life. He thought of masks: the white alabaster masks in Claudio Surian’s workshop, the coloured mask on his dead face, the bautas worn by the figures in his dreams, the high, elaborate costumes he and Francesca had worn at the carnival the year before she died and did not die - an entire city cloaked and veiled and sworn to silence.
‘Your arrival in Italy did not go unnoticed by the Brotherhood,’ she said. ‘They lost you in Rome and put out an alert to all their members. That was how we came to hear that you were here. At first I thought it was some sort of trap for me, but I couldn’t understand how you could have become involved. And then we found out who Father Makonnen was and realized it made some sense after all.
‘Anyway, I guessed you would go to Venice. The rest was easy. There were two places you could not avoid - my tomb on San Michele and the Palazzo Contarini. Brother Antonio told Dermot you had been on San Michele, and ...’
‘He knows?’
She nodded.
‘Only a little. He’s an old friend of Dermot’s, they used to be in Rome together. Dermot once told him a little, asked for help. Since all burials in Venice take place on San Michele, he’s been able to trace back many of the Dead for us, and through them their families. We’ve uncovered some very useful information that way.’
She looked out towards the dome again. The light had gone completely now, leaving the sky a dark shade of purple, like a heavy bruise. The kestrels were gone. A sound of moving traffic rose up from the city below, like a caged beast circling.
‘So you were there that night waiting?’ he said.
‘Yes. I was in the calle outside. I didn’t expect you to catch sight of me in the mist, much less know who I was. I’d no idea then that you had found a photograph, that you guessed I might still be alive.’
‘You wouldn’t have tried to speak to me?’
Her eyes widened.
‘No, of course not. For all I knew, you thought I was dead. I still had no idea of the nature of your involvement. From your point of view, my sudden appearance might have been a terrible shock. From mine, there was a very real danger that you could lead them to me.’
‘But you took me to the hospital.’
‘Of course. When you called my name, I realized you must know or guess that I was alive. Then you collapsed. I couldn’t just leave you there.’
Her hand lay unmoving on the terrace railing. His rested beside it, close, yet not touching. Once, holding hands had been the simplest of gestures. But here, tonight, with a grave and a score of years between them, it would have seemed almost a sacrilege.
‘I had Roberto follow you when you left the hospital,’ she continued. ‘Did you know there was a policeman waiting for you?’
‘Yes. Was he ... ?’
She nodded.
‘Matteo Maglione. He’s their chief man in the Venice carabinieri. He made a mistake going to the hospital himself. Roberto recognized him and realized that you might try getting out the back way. He followed you to Porto Marghera.
‘You made your own mistake, of course, when you started asking questions on Burano, trying to find someone to take you to San Vitale. They were on to you straight away. Fortunately, we were just behind them. Too late to save the old fisherman; but at least we got you both off. You took a great risk going there.’
‘You did as much,’ he said.
She shrugged.
‘I’ve grown used to it. I don’t expect to live forever.’ She shivered. ‘Let’s go in,’ she said. ‘It’s getting cold.’
They went to the kitchen and made coffee. They needed something to do, something to distract them from the tension of waiting. Above all, there was an unspoken agreement between them not to enter into a discussion of what had happened twenty years ago. For Patrick, grief was beginning to slide into outrage at what had, in the final analysis, been nothing more nor less than a betrayal. If Francesca had left him for another man, his life might never have been as damaged as it had been by her supposed death.
She may have been resurrected, but nothing that happened now could give life back to the years he had wasted grieving for her. Nor, he thought, could anything give new life to the love she had destroyed. Perhaps she had been blameless, the victim of pressures she was powerless to resist. But he was in no position to judge. With a shock, he realized that he had already started to resent the fact that she was still alive. So much of his life had been built around her death, so much of him had been buried with her empty coffin, that he wondered if he could find the energy to fill the void her return had left.
He told her what he could of his life after leaving university, omitting all references to his state of mind. In consequence, all he said was curiously grey and barren, a numb recitation of facts, as though compiled by an agency about someone else. He said little of his work with the CIA, and simply concentrated on places he had been and people he had known.
He said a little of the women he had pursued in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to mitigate his grief after her supposed death. But in speaking of them he made no reference to the grief that had underpinned each of his relationships and, in the end, turned them sour. Without intending to do so, he made himself sound callous, his feelings shallow.
There had been an attempt at marriage, five years after Francesca. Unable to admit his continuing need for her, he had inflicted a merciless destruction on the relationship, day after day, night after night, until it had grown pale and sick beyond help. He and his wife had stayed together less than a year.
He talked at length about Ruth. Since leaving Ireland, he had thought of her constantly. The image of her body, pale on a grey shore, haunted him. He understood now why her father had killed her or had her killed, that she had been his necessary sacrifice. Patrick had never loved her as he had once loved Francesca, but until now he had not found the courage to admit it. Since Francesca’s return, Ruth’s ghost had already begun to fade.
Francesca listened in silence. For over twenty years, her own imagination had tormented her with this. How long had he grieved? A year? Two years? She had pictured him in bed with other women, with a wife and children, always happy, all memory of her buried. It gave her no satisfaction now to learn that he had never known the happiness her imagination had so freely granted him.
Strangely, she gave little in return. For the most part, she talked about fraternita - how she had come to hear about it, the help they had given her, the work she had done for them in return. Even if Passover had not happened, she told him, they would eventually have taken their expanding file on the Brotherhood to the State Prosecutor.
‘Do you remember P2?’ she asked.
He nodded.
The P2 scandal had broken in 1981. Fifteen years earlier, a man called Licio Gelli had organized a Masonic Lodge called Raggruppamento Gelli Propaganda Due - P2 for short. By various means, he succeeded in getting some of the most powerful men in the country to join. Members of the Cabinet, several former Prime Ministers, top Civil Servants, almost two hundred senior military men, bankers, magistrates, university professors.
In 1980 one of Gelli’s close friends, a banker named Michele Sindona, was under investigation for fraud. Gelli
