Free The View From the Tower by Charles Lambert

she’s lied to me. And then he thinks, What in God’s name possessed me to accept this invitation? To come back to Rome like this, so publicly? I might as well have put an announcement in the paper. Sitting duck in capital. Pot shots welcome. Because of course this terrible thought has also entered his head. Is this murder directed at me in some way? Is Federico no more than a warning? How many enemies do I still have?
    “Is this necessary? I’ve already explained it to your colleagues this morning. Surely someone takes notes?” Helen glances across at Giacomo and makes a gesture that seems, to his astonishment, to be an invitation to kiss her, two slim fingers brushing her mouth, but is actually a request for a cigarette. He lights it for her, alert to what Helen’s interrogator might do with this glimpse of intimacy. Will he have done his homework? This little man in his cheaply cut grey suit who imagines the right questions will turn up the right answers, because there are right answers, there are always right answers; it’s just a matter of knowing where to look. How much will he know, Giacomo wonders, handing her the lit cigarette, how much will he know about the three of them, no, the four of them, because there was always Stefania, good solid Stefania, about the old days in Turin, when politics was passion, the real and only thing. Sexy, as well, though they didn’t realise that at the time. Or maybe they did. Maybe he and Helen did. This time, though, she should know when it suits her to tell the truth. The shabby man’s not to know she hasn’t, of course. Giacomo’s safe enough so far.
    She takes a drag, then looks for somewhere to put it down, already at a loss to know what to do with a cigarette she doesn’t want. She stopped before Federico, before Stefania even. Anglo-Saxon health fetishism, he’d thought at the time, yet here he is with Yvonne constantly at his throat and the sense of being hounded by clean air fascists in France of all places. Thank God they still won’t let him into the States, that’s one advantage. The interrogator pushes across the desk an ashtray the size of a dinner plate – Giacomo has never been in an Italian hospital that doesn’t have a plentiful supply of ashtrays – and coughs discreetly, as if to say, under the skin we’re the same, we’re men, we understand each other. Giacomo looks at him with unexpected admiration. It’s true in a way. We must be the same age, give or take a year or two, we probably have more in common than either of us dreams, we know the same things, the same flavours, the same fears, unlike those youngsters in the corridor outside who know nothing. He’s right. We understand each other. Isn’t that what they say? Police and thieves.
    Helen stubs out the barely started cigarette, exhales a ribbon of smoke, continues: “I said goodbye to my husband at the car, where we always say goodbye. He drove off – was driven off, I mean – and I went into my local bar, the one on the corner, I don’t know what it’s called, I’ve never looked up to see, and I had a cappuccino and a, no, nothing else. A cappuccino. I spoke to the woman who owns it about something, a few words, I don’t remember what…”
    She is talking in a measured, almost off-hand way that would be insulting in any other situation, as though she has been pestered beyond endurance; but here, in this hospital office that is slowly filling up with smoke, it denotes something else, an exhaustion to which she, more than anyone, is entitled. “After that, I went to the American Library, it’s just down the road from where we live. I wanted to work on my thesis. I’m doing another degree, in American literature, to pass the time really. It was my husband’s idea.”
    She pauses and looks puzzled, as if she is thinking, Why am I saying all this? What business is it of theirs? Or maybe, What am I doing here? Can any of this be real? The man turns his head, in what looks like a