‘So you were there that night waiting?’ he said.
‘Yes. I was in the calle outside. I didn’t expect you to catch sight of me in the mist, much less know who I was. I’d no idea then that you had found a photograph, that you guessed I might still be alive.’
‘You wouldn’t have tried to speak to me?’
Her eyes widened.
‘No, of course not. For all I knew, you thought I was dead. I still had no idea of the nature of your involvement. From your point of view, my sudden appearance might have been a terrible shock. From mine, there was a very real danger that you could lead them to me.’
‘But you took me to the hospital.’
‘Of course. When you called my name, I realized you must know or guess that I was alive. Then you collapsed. I couldn’t just leave you there.’
Her hand lay unmoving on the terrace railing. His rested beside it, close, yet not touching. Once, holding hands had been the simplest of gestures. But here, tonight, with a grave and a score of years between them, it would have seemed almost a sacrilege.
‘I had Roberto follow you when you left the hospital,’ she continued. ‘Did you know there was a policeman waiting for you?’
‘Yes. Was he ... ?’
She nodded.
‘Matteo Maglione. He’s their chief man in the Venice carabinieri. He made a mistake going to the hospital himself. Roberto recognized him and realized that you might try getting out the back way. He followed you to Porto Marghera.
‘You made your own mistake, of course, when you started asking questions on Burano, trying to find someone to take you to San Vitale. They were on to you straight away. Fortunately, we were just behind them. Too late to save the old fisherman; but at least we got you both off. You took a great risk going there.’
‘You did as much,’ he said.
She shrugged.
‘I’ve grown used to it. I don’t expect to live forever.’ She shivered. ‘Let’s go in,’ she said. ‘It’s getting cold.’
They went to the kitchen and made coffee. They needed something to do, something to distract them from the tension of waiting. Above all, there was an unspoken agreement between them not to enter into a discussion of what had happened twenty years ago. For Patrick, grief was beginning to slide into outrage at what had, in the final analysis, been nothing more nor less than a betrayal. If Francesca had left him for another man, his life might never have been as damaged as it had been by her supposed death.
She may have been resurrected, but nothing that happened now could give life back to the years he had wasted grieving for her. Nor, he thought, could anything give new life to the love she had destroyed. Perhaps she had been blameless, the victim of pressures she was powerless to resist. But he was in no position to judge. With a shock, he realized that he had already started to resent the fact that she was still alive. So much of his life had been built around her death, so much of him had been buried with her empty coffin, that he wondered if he could find the energy to fill the void her return had left.
He told her what he could of his life after leaving university, omitting all references to his state of mind. In consequence, all he said was curiously grey and barren, a numb recitation of facts, as though compiled by an agency about someone else. He said little of his work with the CIA, and simply concentrated on places he had been and people he had known.
He said a little of the women he had pursued in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to mitigate his grief after her supposed death. But in speaking of them he made no reference to the grief that had underpinned each of his relationships and, in the end, turned them sour. Without intending to do so, he made himself sound callous, his feelings shallow.
There had been an attempt at marriage, five years after Francesca. Unable to admit his continuing need for her, he had inflicted a merciless destruction on the relationship, day after day, night after night, until it had grown pale and sick beyond help. He and his wife had stayed together less than a year.
He talked at length about Ruth. Since leaving Ireland, he had thought of her constantly. The image of her body, pale on a grey shore, haunted him. He understood now why her father had killed her or had her killed, that she had been his necessary sacrifice. Patrick had never loved her as he had once loved Francesca, but until now he had not found the courage to admit it. Since Francesca’s return, Ruth’s ghost had already begun to fade.
Francesca listened in silence. For over twenty years, her own imagination had tormented her with this. How long had he grieved? A year? Two years? She had pictured him in bed with other women, with a wife and children, always happy, all memory of her buried. It gave her no satisfaction now to learn that he had never known the happiness her imagination had so freely granted him.
Strangely, she gave little in return. For the most part, she talked about fraternita - how she had come to hear about it, the help they had given her, the work she had done for them in return. Even if Passover had not happened, she told him, they would eventually have taken their expanding file on the Brotherhood to the State Prosecutor.
‘Do you remember P2?’ she asked.
He nodded.
The P2 scandal had broken in 1981. Fifteen years earlier, a man called Licio Gelli had organized a Masonic Lodge called Raggruppamento Gelli Propaganda Due - P2 for short. By various means, he succeeded in getting some of the most powerful men in the country to join. Members of the Cabinet, several former Prime Ministers, top Civil Servants, almost two hundred senior military men, bankers, magistrates, university professors.
In 1980 one of Gelli’s close friends, a banker named Michele Sindona, was under investigation for fraud. Gelli got mixed up in the case, his villa was raided, and papers were found, including the P2 membership files. It turned into the biggest political crisis in Italy since the war. The Prime Minister resigned and the government collapsed.
‘Roberto used to talk a lot about the P2 affair,’ she said. ‘He’d studied it in detail and thought our best plan would be to expose the Brotherhood in the same way. But we had to be in an unassailable position first. We couldn’t afford to go public while there were still powerful Brotherhood members unknown to us. The authorities had been lucky with P2: the lists they found at Gelli’s villa contained almost one thousand names, the entire membership of the lodge. Short of a miracle, we have no way of obtaining a list like that for the Brotherhood. As far as I know, none exists.’
She paused and rubbed her forehead as though the tension was giving her a headache.
‘We have our own files, of course. They’re stored in duplicate copies in three separate bank vaults, and Roberto has a master set on computer disks that are kept in a secure location. We’re guessing a little, but we think our list is nearly complete. What we have been looking for over the past two years is hard evidence of the Brotherhood’s activities. All we need is enough to convince one or two people in the right positions that a series of synchronized raids would be justified: the rest of our evidence would turn up then.
Tour friend Eamonn De Faoite worked for us. He started out translating some things from Aramaic, then he branched out for himself, tracking down the Brotherhood in Ireland. There have always been links. They’ve had members in Ireland for hundreds of years. That’s why I was sent to Trinity to study.’
Patrick thought suddenly of the first of his hallucinations, when he had imagined Francesca speaking Irish in an eighteenth-century room in Dublin. Had an ancestor of hers lived there once?
Francesca continued.
‘It wasn’t intended originally that I should be one of the Dead. That privilege had been reserved for my older brother, Umberto. But ... Umberto really was killed in an accident, and I had to take his place. They didn’t tell me until I got to Venice. I tried to... contact you, I...’ She closed her eyes, the pain of the memory returning. ‘They stopped me. I had to leave at once, I had to go to Egypt.’