The Drowning River by Christobel Kent Page A

It had sifted down into Ronnie’s bag, like sand in a swimming bag after a day at the beach.
    ‘What are you thinking, Iris?’ said Hiroko quietly.
    And before she could find a way of stuffing it right down to the bottom of her bag of options and out of sight, Iris said, ‘I think something bad’s happened to her.’
    Luisa had made him get up in the end. Forty years of married life and he had always been the one to fetch her a glass of water in the morning when she was always parched and, besides, it was the secret of good skin.
    Sandro lay under the quilt, unable to face it.
    At eight she sat down on his feet, hard.
    ‘I’ve got to get going in half an hour,’ she said. ‘We’re dressing the windows today.’
    He stayed where he was, immobile, face in the pillow.
    ‘This was what I was worried about,’ she said. ‘Not the lump. Not the biopsy. Not the doctor. I was worried about you.’
    He struggled upright, his stomach clamped hard like iron; it seemed to him that for all a lifetime’s carrying a gun and arresting pimps andwife-beaters and drug-addicted street thieves, he’d never really been frightened by anything in his life before this. Luisa looked into his face.
    ‘It’s very small,’ she said. ‘I’m not afraid of it.’
    There were so many things Sandro wanted to say, and he found he could not say any of them. I love you, would be a start. I can’t live without you, although that would probably be the wrong thing to say, under the circumstances.
    ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’d better get going, too.’ It was Saturday, but there was no point just sitting here, on his own. ‘Can you do lunch? We could have a bite at the Cammillo.’
    ‘Sorry,
caro,’
she said, sounding like she meant it, ‘the shop’s always so busy today.’
    At the door he found himself with his arms around her, his face pressed against hers, his eyes squeezed shut.
    ‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘We’ll go together.’ She pulled back, gave him a wild-eyed look. ‘To the doctor’s,’ he said. ‘We’ll go to see the doctor together.’
    Lucia Gentileschi’s apartment was much closer to the house than Sandro’s office; the Via dei Pilastri was five minutes north of Santa Croce on foot. Her voice through the intercom was clear and steady and she buzzed him up with a firm hand.
    It was a nice building, four hundred years old perhaps; the hall and stairway well kept, with retouched decoration on the vaulted ceiling, pink and grey, and a smell of wax and cleaning fluid in the air. Lucia Gentileschi opened the door to him before he even had a chance to ring, and Sandro found himself briskly ushered into a light and spacious sitting room, almost completely bare of ornament except for a tall candle, burning on a table.
    Holding his coat in her arms, Lucia Gentileschi saw him looking at the candle flickering in the bright room. ‘We light a candle for the dead,’ she said. ‘In the time of mourning.’ She hung the coat up.
    For a second he didn’t understand at all. And then it dawned on him; the slight foreignness he’d detected in Lucia Gentileschi’s manner, a huge eight-armed candelabrum in the window of the dusty little shophe’d passed, the street itself. The great green-domed synagogue, for God’s sake, just around the corner in the Via Farini, never mind Ruth’s Kosher Café; Sandro had lived in Florence for close to sixty years and had for all of those known that this was what you might call the Jewish quarter, if such things could still be said.
    ‘Yes,’ was all he said. ‘Of course.’
    Still on her feet, Lucia Gentileschi eyed him, small and fierce. You should meet my wife, he thought.
    ‘You didn’t know?’ she said, with the ghost of a smile. Sandro gave an apologetic shrug.
    ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I mean, it was one of the reasons the police made me angry. That they thought it was significant. Because Claudio was two years in a concentration camp, they thought it meant he was more likely