Dead Season (13 page)

Outside the light was turning yellow and hazy in the late afternoon; the Loggiata had no air-conditioning but relied on the time-honoured methods of fans and shutters and damp cloths hung in strategic places. They sat very still and breathed shallowly in the heat, he and Giuli and the wary Russian, and they waited.

Take your time, Sandro thought. Don’t hurry down, little Anna Niescu, don’t worry that child you’re protecting so carefully, don’t raise your heartbeat. Give me time to think about how I’m going to give you this news.

He had waited in a bar in a backstreet, a dirty little place. ‘I’ll be there in a bit,’ Pietro had said, rolling his eyes and dismissing Sandro. ‘Wait for me.’

He’d walked in ten minutes later, frowning down at his mobile, and had called right there and then, from the bar. The seedy barman had eyed Pietro as he talked, his voice hushed and careful. Sandro had listened to one half of the conversation – the other half he could reconstruct on his own, from long familiarity and the occasional loud, gasping exclamation audible even from where he stood, a discreet metre from his old friend.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he’d heard Pietro say, again and again. He was better at this than Sandro ever had been; Pietro had a natural gentleness, where Sandro became gruff and brusque when he felt emotion struggling inside him.

‘I’m so sorry, Signora Brunello. Yes, yes – you need to have someone take care of the children, I don’t advise – no. Is there any relative you could leave them with? And perhaps someone to accompany you? It can be a very overwhelming experience.’

You can say that again, Sandro had thought. For the police – on nodding acquaintance with the morgue, its smells and sounds, the unmistakable grey pallor of a dead face, the particular lividity of a bruise on dead flesh – it was bad enough. But for most bereaved fathers, wives, mothers, it was the first and only time. For Signora Brunello and those like her, this would be the single worst moment of their lives.

She would come back into the baking city from the fresh salt air of the seaside, she would drive closer and closer, winding her window down to pay the toll that marked her entry into the inferno, and the choking, intolerable heat would roll in like poison gas. Coming back for this.

Pietro had hung up, looking grave.

‘Glad I don’t have to do that any more,’ Sandro had said, to comfort him, before realizing that
that
was just what he would have to do, and soon.

Now the Russian looked up from her magazine, sharp-eared as a cat, and Sandro turned to follow her glance. Anna Niescu came towards them through the glazed door from the
loggia
lopsidedly carrying a mop-bucket, and the eagerness in her face made Sandro scowl. Giuli, who knew what that scowl meant, nudged him sharply.

‘Miss Niescu,’ he said, getting to his feet. She set the mop-bucket down, searching his face, and Sandro took her hand in both his. It felt as small as a child’s, and hot.

The Russian girl muttered something that sounded like a curse in her own language and hauled the mop-bucket behind the desk. ‘Too heavy,’ she said in her accented Italian. ‘I tell you, I will carry this for you.’

‘Can we talk somewhere – private?’ asked Sandro, looking from Anna to the receptionist. The Russian nodded towards the door through which Anna had arrived.

‘Outside,’ she said.

Anna kept looking up at Sandro as they walked, but he couldn’t look back. He tried not to think of Claudio Brunello, of the Claudio Brunello he had seen, stiffened and bloodless and insulted by the elements, inhuman behind the soiled oleanders as cars roared past. He pushed open the door to let her through ahead of him.

The open
loggia
, stretching perhaps twenty metres of dusty cotto under its beamed and tiled roof, was set with groupings of old cane chairs and low tables. The furthest of them were laid for tomorrow’s breakfast. A table for four and one for two; August was a quiet month, but even so. Six guests were not enough to support a place like this.

‘It’s cool in the mornings,’ said Anna, seeing him looking. ‘All of our guests like to have their breakfast here.’ She gestured for him to sit, pulled out a chair for him, and he came around behind her and did the same for her. Giuli managed on her own.

And then they were seated, and it had to be said.

‘Anna,’ he said, as gently as he could, ‘I’m afraid there’s some bad news.’

She stared, and her soft brown eyes seemed to darken, and there came into them an awful knowingness that perhaps had always been there, the last vestige of the abandoned child she had once been.

‘Bad news?’ she said quietly, and her small hands sat on either side of her belly, stilling it.

‘An accident,’ said Sandro, the dreadful deceitfulness of the word sour in his mouth. Giuli leaned across and took Anna’s hand, and the girl’s head tilted back just a little, her hand came up to cover half her face.

Sandro leaned close, to draw her back to him. ‘A man was – the police think he was struck by a car, out – out near the Viale Amendola. The African market: do you know the African market?’ He saw her face bleach with fear and confusion. ‘We think he may be your fiancé. He had some documentation on him.’

And Anna Niescu let her hand fall and looked into his eyes. Her mouth was trembling and she began to shake her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no, I – no. The African market? Why would he be there? On the
viale
?’

And Sandro had nothing to say to that, because she must know by now, mustn’t she? That her beloved Josef wasn’t what he seemed. Anna Niescu was not stupid. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all he could think of. And then, ‘I’m afraid we will need you – to identify him. To come and make sure.’

And then the hand flew to her mouth to stifle an awful sound, because now she understood. That this was real: there was a body, and she must look at it.

‘Yes,’ she said, eyes wide, blinking to stifle the tears, but Sandro could see them.

They had talked about this. He and Pietro.

‘The wife, first, of course,’ Sandro had said, and silently Pietro had compressed his lips in agreement. Not a matter of the law, but of propriety. It wasn’t for them to judge the rights and wrongs in Brunello’s marriage.

‘She said she would probably be able to get here by six,’ Pietro had said. ‘She’s leaving the children in Monterosso, with their grandmother.’

‘His mother?’

Sandro had been aghast: first one, then others, the bereaved always multiplied like this. Pietro had shaken his head. ‘Hers.’

Was that a mercy? Silently they had agreed that it was.

And then, drily, reluctantly, because it was almost certainly in defiance of protocol, Pietro had said, ‘I imagine you would like – to be there?’

And, as reluctantly, Sandro had said that he would. Tried to calculate the horrible logistics of talking to Anna, getting over to the morgue to observe the wife and her reactions, and then bringing Anna herself, the pregnant lover, to take her turn identifying the body.

‘Do you want me to come now?’ said Anna, and her hands moved, reaching about her pointlessly for something that might aid her: handbag, cardigan.

‘Not quite now,’ said Sandro. ‘There are – procedures first, that the police have to carry out.’

She looked at him blankly, but nodded. Ever obedient. Sandro felt a pang, because it was nonsense, wasn’t it? Procedures? Lies, was more like it. Lies and evasions: when would it end? When Brunello’s widow came face to face with this girl? Would they be able to avoid that?

Almost certainly they would not. If they wanted to make a case for suicide, then they would have to produce something beyond the happy family, on holiday by the sea, the comfortable job. The expensive car.

Where was it, that car?

‘He took the car,’ Pietro had said shortly. ‘I didn’t want – to go too much further. On the phone. But she said, he took the car, she’d been using the little runaround they keep by the sea.’

‘Little runaround,’ Sandro had repeated. It said everything.

Outside the Loggiata, the builders’ noise had started up again, although the light was mellowing as the afternoon wore on. Bang, bang, bang: there was something vicious about it, something sullen and monotonous and horrible. With every report Anna Niescu’s shoulders contracted, like an animal drawing into itself under attack.

‘I don’t think it can be until tomorrow morning,’ said Sandro on impulse, seeing a way through those logistics. He knew what it would mean for her, but it was suddenly imperative that Brunello’s wife – widow – should be long gone before Anna got there. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Tomorrow?’ Her voice was an anguished, disbelieving whisper.

‘I’ll come back for you,’ said Sandro. ‘You should rest, if you can.’

She looked at him vaguely: she was pale and her skin gleamed with sweat. Sandro was brought up short by the realization that, whatever happened, within a month this child would be giving birth to another. Perhaps sooner than that.

‘I’ll stay with you,’ said Giuli to Anna gently, arm around her shoulders.

‘Oh, no,’ said Anna quickly, vaguely, ‘I’ve got work to do. The kitchen has to be ready for the morning.’

‘Anna,’ said Sandro, ‘I know you would like to keep busy, perhaps. But think of your baby. Concentrate on your baby: that’s the important thing.’ He saw her mouth form a little ‘O’ as she breathed, saw her place a hand between her breasts to calm herself.

‘Yes,’ she said. A little colour returned to her face as she stayed very still.

‘Let me stay,’ said Giuli again. ‘Just see how we go. I can help you, in the kitchen, if that’s what you want to do.’ She darted a glance at Sandro. ‘All right?’

He nodded just once, quickly. Giuli took Anna by the wrists gently and held her gaze. ‘All right?’

‘Yes,’ said Anna and, as so often happened, it was the kindness that brought the tears. The bad news shattered them, dried their eyes and mouths, paralysed them, but it was the arm around the shoulder that made them cry.

Below the lovely, crumbling
loggia
, the builders had at last stopped banging; they were slinging scaffolding joints into a barrow instead, on their way out. The three sat without speaking until at last the noise was no more than the echo of the final steel-capped boot. Sandro left the two women there, so close they were almost one, the neat black cap of hair pressed in under Giuli’s chin.

As he left, Sandro nodded his brief thanks to the Russian. She looked up, beady-eyed as a bird.

‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Is bad news?’ She spoke warily, wanting information, prepared to give nothing away herself.

‘Bad news,’ said Sandro. ‘Yes.’

‘She don’t deserve it,’ said the girl. It was delivered bluntly, but contained within it also the fatalistic recognition that rarely are the good rewarded.

She might have been beautiful, with her thick black brows and her white, white skin, if she didn’t seem so angry, angry even before she knew why they were here. What was she angry about? Being here, in August, being far from home? Perhaps it was just a Russian characteristic. Defiance and anger.

‘No,’ Sandro said. ‘She deserves better.’

C
HAPTER
T
EN

T
HERE WAS A SUITE
of rooms at the police morgue, for the receiving of family members; one of them had a viewing room behind a one-way mirror. Behind it Sandro sat and watched Pietro as he stood beneath a large and ornate black crucifix, his hands clasped earnestly, talking to Claudio Brunello’s wife – widow. Sandro knew they wouldn’t let him in the room, although he’d tried.

‘Sorry,’ Pietro had said, shifting a glance at Matteucci, the northern dolt, who had obstinately refused to understand what Sandro was doing there at all. (‘Say that again? He’s who?’) Pietro had spread his hands. ‘Best I can do.’

They had viewed the body.

She’d said six, but Irene Brunello had been there at ten to. From the long window to the small office Pietro shared with half a dozen others and once with Sandro too, they saw her park her small yellow car – a brand-new Punto, so bright, so jaunty, so appropriate for the beach cafés and villas of Monterosso, so grimly wrong for the car park of the big grey police station on the ring road at Porta al Prato.

‘We’ve got the car on CCTV entering the city,’ Pietro had said abruptly as they watched. His eyes had been sad although Sandro hadn’t known whom his old friend pitied most: Sandro for his stubborn resistance to the obvious, messy explanations, the dead man, or the dead man’s wife. ‘A silver Audi. Twelve-thirty, he came through the motorway toll at Firenze Nord. The car, the number plate, his face at the wheel.’

‘Quick work,’ Sandro had said. ‘Good work.’ He averted his eyes. ‘You don’t know where the car is now.’

‘We’ll find it.’

Somehow they had known, he and Pietro and even Matteucci, even before her slim, tanned sandalled foot first touched the ground, her trim, straight-backed figure, that it was Irene Brunello in that little car.

Early forties: a good age for a woman, or should be, the fierce anxieties of youth all done with, the hard work of child-rearing easing off, enough money coming in. Given the right circumstances in life, of course, given health, given family, children, a happy marriage.

To Sandro, far above, and observing her framed in a great window twice as high as he was, Irene Brunello had looked as if she’d had all that, until today.

Sandro had hovered as they’d greeted her sombrely; she had been too distracted to ask who he was. The tears had dried – she seemed a woman of strong character, bound to the proprieties, to not breaking down in public – but they had left their traces. Her handsome face was puffy and the seaside tan, overlaying drawn and anxious features, had the effect of making her look older than her years. This was entirely a grieving widow, he had no doubt. There had been a quick handshake, the exchange of formal greetings that implied condolence but also avoided the word itself, not wanting to make assumptions.

‘Let me see him,’ she had said, a twist of handkerchief at her mouth.

She knows it’s him, Sandro had thought. Some women refused to believe it:
I said goodbye to him only this morning
, they’d say.
It can’t be
. Not this wife.