Chapter 51 Rafaella
Rafaella
Dante slumped to the ground, his body falling beside Fon’s and their blood pooling together in one single sea. He hadn’t even had time to look surprised, his death mask freeze-framing the dark menace that had characterized his life. He had lived in anger and died in fury.
Rafaella stared down at him in shock, swaying unsteadily on her feet but frozen, as if rooted in position. She had stopped in her tracks when the bullet grazed her, its whistle screaming past her ear en route to its target. She felt hands on her arms, holding her up, as Cosimo caught up with her.
‘Rafa? Are you OK?’ he asked desperately, checking her for a wound as she looked back at him blankly.
She couldn’t comprehend what had happened.
In a matter of moments, two lives had been lost. She had woken this morning expecting to become a fugitive.
Instead she was a widow – Gina too. ‘Did it hit you?’
She couldn’t answer him. She couldn’t feel her body at all. She was in shock. None of this was real …
‘Fede,’ she whispered, catching sight of Cosimo’s brother staggering erratically, his face pulled into a mask of grief, tears rolling down his cheeks. He was thin, far thinner than the last time she’d seen him years earlier, his hair shaggy, though he was clean-shaven.
Cosimo turned too and saw his brother looking close to collapse. ‘Fede,’ he cried, looking around and finding the switchblade that had fallen from Dante’s hand as the bullet hit. He grabbed it and ran to him, cutting the ties around Fede’s wrists and freeing him at last.
The brothers embraced, Fede crying out as withered muscles in his chest and arms were released, burning now from the sudden movement. He buried his face in Cosimo’s shoulder as they sank together to the ground.
‘It’s OK, it’s over,’ Cosimo told him as Fede sobbed. ‘It’s over now.’
Rafaella looked down at Dante’s beautiful, arrogant corpse by her feet. Blood was spilling from a neat bullet hole in his head and the memory replayed unbidden in her mind, still echoing through her body: the crack of the gunshot, that blistering whistle as it tore through the air …
She gasped, realizing that in the midst of the chaos, as bodies fell and staggered and ran, the bullet had come from a gun none of them had fired. She whipped round to look back towards the car … to the farmhouse … its door open …
She caught her breath as she saw who was standing there. ‘You …?’
Flavia looked back at her. The gun was still in her hand, still smoking, but she dropped it into the dirt as she staggered forward, her eyes on the bodies. ‘Is it done?’ she asked, her voice strangled. ‘Are they dead?’
Rafaella stared; she couldn’t stop staring. ‘What have you done …?’ she asked as the nanny came and stood beside her, shaking.
‘What I swore to do.’ Flavia met her eyes. ‘Vengeance – for my brother.’
Cosimo frowned. ‘Your brother …?’
‘Mattias Lobascio,’ Rafaella said for her, seeing how Flavia softened at the sound of his name.
She remembered Flavia telling her that her younger brother had died, but it was only now she remembered the young boy’s death had been all the talk back home.
He had been murdered around the time of Silvana’s wedding, his body left on the hillside to be found the next day; the corpse had been arranged almost kindly despite the gaping wound in his chest. The case had never been solved and Rafaella, to her shame, had been too overtaken by the tragedies in her own life to dwell on it.
But it had been closer to her than she’d ever realized.
She looked down at Fon and Dante, bleeding into the dirt. ‘… They killed him?’ she whispered.
Flavia nodded, her mouth set in a grim line as she met the dead men’s empty eyes.
Rafaella recoiled, squeezing her eyes shut. She felt sick – sickened that she had ever had a good word to say about her husband, shown him kindness, felt compassion.
‘You’re certain?’ Cosimo asked, seeing Rafaella’s shame.
‘Deathbed confession. Pablo Carrieri admitted it,’ Flavia said in a quiet voice, still watching Rafaella. ‘He wanted to purge his conscience but Father Tommaso couldn’t get to him in time, so he told his wife instead. He told her what they’d done on the morning of your sister’s wedding.’
Rafaella whimpered, distressed. She had been so happy that day – celebrating with her family, dressing up with Romola, making love to Cosimo … but death had been all around her, within touching distance.
‘Who were “they”, exactly?’ Cosimo asked.
‘Pablo. Francesco. Dante and Alfonso,’ Flavia replied. ‘Pablo stabbed him, but Mattias wasn’t killed outright. Dante tried to get Fon to finish him off, but he couldn’t do it … Not that that makes him innocent,’ she said quickly.
‘No,’ Rafaella murmured.
‘Pablo’s wife came and told us what she knew,’ Flavia went on, her voice dull, as if she’d been steam-rollered flat.
‘It was no surprise, but it gave us the certainty we needed. By then the Giannellis were behind everything in Salento. They had risen fast by being ruthless.’ She swallowed, closing her eyes, the sun on her face as she thought back.
‘… My family knew getting close to them wouldn’t be easy.
By then they had moved here, and their network of informers made them almost untouchable.
’ Her eyes opened again. ‘But my mother said no one ever pays attention to the woman looking after the children and washing the bedsheets …’ She smiled coldly, unapologetically.
‘And so Big Man Dante Giannelli was killed by a woman. I lived in his and his brother’s houses, right under their noses, just waiting for the perfect moment to strike. ’
Flavia looked over at Fede, who was listening too, ashen-faced. He looked as if he was in shock; Rafaella wasn’t sure how much of this he was taking in.
‘My husband and I followed him here and saw you with Fon the other day,’ she went on. ‘It was clear you were important to him, even more important than you were valuable. His marriage was falling apart. His wife was leaving him.’
Rafaella remembered that moment yesterday in Gina’s bedroom, when they’d heard the floorboard creak outside and Flavia had appeared a moment later. Their instincts had been right; she had been eavesdropping.
‘… I knew that coming back here and waiting was my best chance of getting him and his brother together, without lots of witnesses.’
‘So you would have killed Fon too? If Francesco hadn’t done it for you?’ Fede asked in a strangled voice. ‘He was going to die today, no matter what?’ Tears shone in his eyes. He looked broken.
Flavia hesitated. ‘… No.’
‘No?’
‘I hated him for having been there. He was no innocent. But he wasn’t a monster either. It was only because of him that we got Mattias’s body back. Dante had wanted Mattias chopped up … with the cows … to get rid of all the evidence …’ Flavia’s voice wavered on the words. Everyone flinched.
‘… Pablo told his wife, Fon said no. He said it was the only time he ever saw Fon stand up to his brother. He was adamant Matti’s body should be left so that we could have a burial.’
‘And that meant you could swear the vendetta?’ Cosimo ventured.
Flavia nodded.
‘I don’t understand,’ Rafaella said, looking between them.
‘Vengeance can only be sworn in the presence of the body,’ Flavia murmured.
‘If they’d done it Dante’s way, there would have been no body, no proof – and I wouldn’t be standing here now.
’ She jerked her chin in the air defiantly.
‘So take me to the police if that’s what you want.
I’ve done what I set out to do, and I am proud of it. ’
Rafaella looked between Cosimo and Fede. Flavia had killed a killer, and it seemed to her that a bullet between the eyes had been a mercifully quick death for a man who had slain a child. He had deserved worse.
She raised her eyes to the horizon, her gaze fastening on a lop-shouldered figure tearing over the hill and growing ever more distant. Francesco was getting away.
‘He won’t get far,’ Cosimo said, following her line of sight. ‘The police will catch up with him.’
‘And when they do?’ she asked. ‘What do we tell them? … Because as far as I’m concerned, Flavia’s done nothing wrong here. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, Flavia was never even here today.’ She stepped closer to Flavia, interlocking her arm through the nanny’s.
Cosimo watched, getting the drift of her argument. ‘We did all see Francesco kill Fon in cold blood,’ he agreed.
They looked over at Fede, the lawyer among them. ‘… When Dante came at him, he pulled out the gun and defended himself. It was kill or be killed,’ Fede murmured. ‘We were all witnesses.’
They shared looks, understanding the implications of their agreement.
Francesco would be convicted of a crime he hadn’t committed – but they all knew he would never be convicted of many he had.
And who could pity men who were butchers?
Justice didn’t always follow the letter of the law. Just as love was more than vows.
Cosimo held his arms out and Rafaella walked into them, closing her eyes as he kissed her hair.
Finally it was over.
Finally, it was beginning.