Stefano was watching us. I had felt he was listening to our conversation, as soon as I met his gaze in the rearview mirror his eyes flicked back to the road, but not before I saw some complex emotion pass across his features, not before Mark saw him too. He leaned forward without warning and shouted, Why are you listening, why are you eavesdropping? What does my son have to do with you?
I gripped Mark’s arm and he leaned back into his seat and then he began sobbing, he said again, I don’t know what Isabella will do, I don’t know what she will do. I embraced him as well as I could, he was a large man and the car was bumping along the road. He held my hand as he continued sobbing, my arms around him. I looked up and my gaze met Stefano’s, we watched each other for several long seconds and then he dropped his gaze back to the road in front of him.
How is Maria? I asked him.
Although he did not look at me, I saw from his reflection in the rearview mirror that he was startled. She is fine, he said after a moment, she is okay. He still looked uneasy, he had been caught off guard, I continued watching him in the mirror but he did not meet my gaze, he was looking at the road ahead, perhaps it did need his attention, the surface was in terrible condition.
Deep down, Stefano must have known that Christopher was only the external manifestation—like ectoplasm from a medium’s mouth—of the deeper and more intractable deadlock between him and Maria, the problem of his unreciprocated love. I continued watching Stefano, as we drove out of the village and toward the hotel, Mark’s body heavy in my arms. What was the meaning of the relief I had seen in his face, when he had been listening to Mark, was it the fact that there were no suspects, very little evidence, a net with plenty of holes, through which he might yet escape? Could it have been, as he drove us back to the hotel, that he sat in the front seat with his feeling of relief—the police didn’t have a clue, they didn’t even know that Maria had seen Christopher just before his death—and his belief that he was still a free man?
A free man. Who soon would carry on with his slow courtship, who once again had all the time in the world. Maria would be in need of comfort, and Stefano would be in an ideal position to provide it. If he was smart he would not denigrate Christopher too much (that scum, he got what was coming to him) but would be kind, sensitive, entirely forgiving (what a terrible and unfathomable thing, a man in the prime of his life, no, I couldn’t have wished such a death on anyone).
And if he was patient, if he was not too pushy (as was his wont, this was his fatal flaw, but perhaps he had learned a thing or two), she would eventually turn to him. Because however insubstantial the affair with Christopher—and for all I knew it had been nothing more than a night, two nights—his death would have left a hole in her life. Where previously there had been the fantasy of love, of escape, the excitement of an unknown man, there was now nothing, a woman could coddle a fantasy for only so long, particularly a dead one.
And then there would be space for Stefano. Perhaps it would not even take that long—once you had made up your mind, if Maria were to make up her mind, then things progressed very quickly, perhaps that was even why she had been so reluctant, knowing that once she gave in to Stefano, the remainder of her life would be delineated in an instant, the entire future known. She was young, it was only natural that she would fight against such certainty.
Whether he was guilty or innocent, I knew that he sat in front of us in an agony of anticipation, which he was struggling to conceal, he had hopes for the future, or rather a single hope, which might yet prove foolish. But it was closer than ever before, just within his grasp, a fact of which he could not help but be aware, and so he sat in the car, trying to maintain an appropriately funereal air—after all, there was a grown man crying in the backseat—while a symphony of excitement welled inside him. He reached back with a tissue, which I accepted in silence and passed to Mark, he blew his nose into the paper and said, to me, to Stefano, Thank you.
? ? ?
I left Mark to tell Isabella. He went up the stairs very slowly—if he went slowly enough then perhaps he would never arrive at the top, never have to confront his wife—it was clear he dreaded telling Isabella about the investigation, or rather the lack of it, the whole thing already dead in the water, that he was fearful of her response, there would be a scene, hysterics, she would not take the news lying down. She would upbraid Mark, the nearest and most obvious target, insisting that he go further into the matter (Lady Macbeth, chastising her lord), and yet Mark had said, There’s nothing to be done, and I believed him.
But had everything been done, truly everything? Inside my room, I hesitated and then picked up the telephone and dialed the police station. I was put through to the police chief at once—I did not identify myself on the telephone, there was no need, they knew who I was, there were not so many Americans here—and he answered with a wary, Yes? I told him that I had a piece of information, that might or might not be relevant, but given that they were looking for a woman, the signs of an affair, or had been—