padlock clear of the packaging, and the keys fell to the paving. She bent to retrieve them. There was, immediately below her, a current moving in the water, a free flow between two banks. The river had been low long enough for scrub to have taken hold on the banks. Great dead boughs and trunks were scattered in it, old trees that had been swept downstream by the early spring’s flood rip.
All she knew of the bridge was what Castrolami had told her – not the crap about its history, but about the lamppost that had threatened to collapse and the replacement of low metal posts with a chain running between them that the city mayor had ordered to be erected. The padlock she had bought was heavy-duty, would have been a struggle to break through even with large bolt-cutters. It had two good keys that shone in the morning sunshine. The man in the hardware shop had wanted to sell her a padlock with combination numbers. She had refused and he had persisted until she had flared at him that it was not his business what sort of padlock she purchased. Then he had understood, and the smile had crossed his face, a patronising tolerance of the young, and he had offered her a cheap, shiny model, made in China; the implication was that a good padlock would be wasted when fastened to the column. Castrolami had said that young people in love came to the bridge with padlocks – like the couple who stood along the rail from her and kissed. She had told the shopkeeper she wanted the best, and that she was prepared to pay thirty-five euros for a lock with keys. Only when she had paid did he tell her slyly that it was possible to buy the padlocks from an Albanian trader on the bridge, but not of quality. She could see the one the couple had. Together they hooked it on to the chain, and she thought it would have cost ten euros at most. For them it was a joke, a diversion, and a chance to kiss again. There was a long line of padlocks on that section of chain, enough to make it sag. Names had been written in indelible ink on some.
Immacolata did not have a pen with indelible ink: if she had, she would not have used it.
She threw the packaging over the bridge’s stone rail, watched it flutter down, fall into the flow and float away, like a boat. The couple had broken in their embrace and now eyed her with hostility. She gave them the look of contempt of a daughter of the Borelli clan, and must have intimidated them because they hurried on with their business on the bridge. She might, perhaps, in that gesture of throwing away the plastic and cardboard, have unsettled them; they would have seen her face – her chin and eyes – and been nervous of intervening to chastise her. Their moment of declared love had, maybe, been lessened by their fear of her. She watched them go south, and towards the road sign for the Lungotevere. They didn’t turn, kept their backs to her, and held close to each other.
Immacolata thought that placing the padlock on the chain on the bridge was about as relevant as laying fresh bouquets beside a road where there had been a fatality in a traffic accident. Irrelevant, but she thought it worthwhile.
She wondered then if he saw her, pictured her. She had the image of him: grubby jeans, socks that usually had a hole at the heel or the toe, yesterday’s shirt, his hair unbrushed, the smile and the laughter that walked with him, the flatness of his stomach, the delicacy of his fingers, the thin thighs and… She seemed, inside herself, to arch and press and be closer so that he went deeper. She remembered Eddie. She knew what they would do to him. She was of the Borelli family, and she knew how pain and fear were used as regular weapons of choice. She did not have him there to kiss.
She kissed the padlock face: it was cold, remote. She let her lips linger on it.
The chain was rusted, lower than the rail, and festooned with the padlocks of lovers. She hesitated. She heard a little squeal of mirth, mocking, and the Albanian who sold the padlocks on the bridge was staring at her and would have been wondering why she had come alone, and why she paused. Could she not make up her fucking mind? He might have thought that. The water was dull, dirty and wound between the banks. There was nothing attractive about the view upstream, nothing of majesty.
She made her commitment. Immacolata took three steps, four, to the chain, then looked for a section that was not already crowded and found one. She didn’t kneel because that would have been an act of sentimentality. She crouched, used a key to open the padlock, then secured it to a link in the chain and snapped it shut. It hung there, and for a moment the sun was on it.
She stepped back, held the keys between her fingers and remembered what Castrolami had told her, and what she had seen the lovers do hurriedly after they had scowled at her for letting the packaging drop. They would have taken longer over it but she had destroyed their moment… Not important to her. The sun was over the next bridge, still low enough to dazzle her. It was indeed her commitment. There were three keys on the ring, little bright trinkets of her mood. Not diamonds, not jewels, not flowers, but three keys from a Chinese factory. She raised her arm, saw his face, threw them, watched them fall, irretrievable, saw the splash and the fast-forming ripples, then only the swirl of the current.
‘The old mendicante was right. I’m surprised,’ Rossi said.
‘The old beggar’s usually right,’ Orecchia said.
‘Is she going to jump in after them?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Do we go for her now?’
Orecchia said, ‘As we would for a mourner beside a family grave. Half a minute for contemplation, then we go.’
They had been there a quarter of an hour. They had been sitting on a low railing in the shade of the trees, with the scent of the market’s fruit stalls behind them, and they had waited to see if Castrolami’s judgement was sure or whether it leaked. They had seen her come, with that haughty stride, as if she was of God’s chosen few, on to the bridge – as Castrolami had said she would – and each man had let out an involuntary sigh of relief.
‘Would we have been fired?’
‘Probably “returned to unit”, probably on a trash heap. I think he told very few. It’s contained.’
‘Would you do that? Buy a padlock, waste it, throw away the key?’
‘I know too little about romance.’ A faint grin broke on Orecchia’s face. ‘Come on.’
They stood.
‘How do we treat her?’
‘Like an old friend. How else?’
Orecchia led. They skipped through the traffic, crossed the far pavement and walked out on to the bridge.
Rossi asked, ‘Do we go gently or kick hell out of her?’
Orecchia answered, side of his mouth, ‘I lead, Alessandro, an uncomplicated life. I have a wife who tolerates me, a kid who accepts my usefulness to him as a milch-cow, I have a cat who ignores me but doesn’t scratch. I have an apartment I can afford, I have a cheque in the bank on the first day of each month and an attractive pension fund. I don’t live with a perpetual crisis at my shoulder. They do, the collaborators. She does. I would say, Alessandro, that betrayal brings a heavy burden. It would be attractive to kick her for what she has done to us today, but our anxieties are small in comparison with her agony.’
‘Sensitively put. It does you credit.’ Rossi grinned wryly. ‘But has she capitulated? Is that what this crap, the padlock and the key, is about?’
‘I think not,’ Orecchia said.
She looked proud, the older of the two thought, and seemed in no hurry to leave the bridge. She would have seen them coming from the edge of her vision but made no move. Orecchia had seen the flash of light on the keys but not where they went into the water. Almost magnificent – better than proud, he thought, as she stared up the river. Beside him, Rossi was alert, on the balls of his feet, ready for pursuit. Orecchia was beside her, close but not intruding on her mood.
He said, ‘I think, Signorina, that it is time for us to go back up the hill and continue with our work. Are you ready, or would you like a few moments longer?’
She shook her head.
‘You’re ready?’
She nodded.
He was at her shoulder as they came off the bridge, Rossi behind them. They walked briskly at his pace, and she matched it. She told him she’d paid thirty-five euros for the padlock, and seemed to expect a comment.
Orecchia quoted a frequent remark of his child, usually offered when the father attempted to limit expenditure: ‘I think in this world, Signorina, you get what you pay for. I imagine that for thirty-five euros you have a very fine padlock.’
