Free A Darkness Descending by Christobel Kent Page B

him like this. I’ll pay.’
    ‘That could be tricky.’ Luisa spoke thoughtfully.
    ‘She said, come round tomorrow morning,’ Sandro said, his eye drawn back to the square as the demonstrators moved on. ‘She said I could talk to him then.’
    ‘Better make sure she’s out of the way first.’
    ‘Hmmm,’ Sandro said, evading the issue. He couldn’t imagine how one would go about telling Maria Rosselli what to do. ‘I might need you for that,’ he said vaguely.
    ‘And what about the insurance claim?’ Luisa said, eyeing him with exasperation. ‘When are you going to fit that in, a bit of proper paid work?’
    Sandro passed a hand over his forehead and found it moist: the evening was still warm. She was right, of course. ‘I’ll fit it in,’ he said. He’d probably only need to clap eyes on the man to know if he was scamming them. You could tell trauma, real trauma. Talk to the neighbours. ‘First thing maybe, get the lie of the land.’
    Luisa made a sceptical sound, and he looked out into the darkness, avoiding her eye. An army vehicle was following the demonstrators slowly around the wide piazza, between the parked cars. A tiny thing, the soldiers inside it seemed to fill it right up, heads knocking on the roof, the driver hunched awkwardly over the wheel, like something out of the Keystone Cops. Not in their brief surely, though Sandro vaguely remembered something Bastone had said about Rosselli lobbying them over road permissions: he must have got their goat. Watching it all come to a halt, the procession and the vehicle in its wake, Sandro wondered: if the military had turned up here, who else could be keeping tabs on the Frazione Verde … the carabinieri?… the Polizia di Stato?
    A movement along the terrace alerted him, he couldn’t have said why. A big man was sitting there smoking: he’d raised his hand for the waiter. On the little table in front of him, next to an untouched glass of grappa, lay an open notebook. A journalist? Did reporters still use pen and paper? The waiter was leaning down to him now, they were exchanging a joke, the tall man gesturing with his cigarette at the crowd. Sandro wondered if this man had written the article on Rosselli’s collapse that he’d read this morning, had been responsible for the amused, sly tone of the piece. The man seemed to detect the interest from their direction, and Sandro looked back at the soldiers.
    When he had been a police officer they’d kept files on certain extremists, mostly right-wingers but once a communist who had a record for arson. It could only be justified if there were evidence of any criminal activity, in theory. As for AISI – Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Interna, the secret service – well, they were a law unto themselves. Would they bother with a little bunch of Oltrarno hippy agitators? You never knew. If they thought those same hippies were in danger of actually getting something done, they might.
    The door of the army vehicle opened and its occupants emerged untidily, crumpled by their confinement, adjusting their caps … three, four. One of them lit up a cigarette, holding it discreetly under his palm as he leaned against the car. Sandro couldn’t remember if that was allowed these days. He got to his feet, stretched.
    ‘Where are you going?’ asked Luisa, sitting back in her seat.
    ‘Nowhere,’ he said. ‘Just due passi , a little wander. I want to see what this is about. Hang on.’ He stepped down off the terrace.
    There was an air of lazy ease about the small group of soldiers as he approached them: the procession seemed to have diffused into something harmlessly amateurish and had in fact stopped proceeding anywhere. Sandro felt a stab of pity for Giuli and all her passion. Roads had to be built, didn’t they? He assumed that the tallest soldier, turning at his approach, would be the senior officer, and so it turned out: he recognized the badge of a colonel. The man looked at him with that air of