Dead Season (16 page)

It came to him as he followed Luisa’s slow, deliberate movements around the kitchen, trying, as he seemed often to be doing, to interpret her. Luisa needed interpretation because she was in her way a master strategist, a Machiavelli. She didn’t ask anything straight out, she checked the lie of the land. She talked to him over her shoulder as she fiddled with the peeling of an onion, about her own day.

‘The shop was full, can you believe it? We had out the autumn collections, boots and sweaters, and people were buying them.’ Shook her head in mystification. ‘Forty degrees outside.’ She chopped. Onion, carrot, celery, garlic. Parsley.

‘He knows what he’s doing, old Frollini,’ said Sandro mildly. Frollini – not much older that Sandro if truth be told – Luisa’s suave boss, was a bone of contention between them. Too fond of Luisa for Sandro’s comfort, too smooth, too rich. ‘The world’s changing. People want to shop in August.’

‘For ski jackets? For the dregs of last season’s things in the sale? Dragging round a city when there are woods and rivers and seaside? It’s not changing for the better.’

Sandro smiled to himself: she knew how to soothe him, with her indignation. Luisa could tell even with her back turned what kind of a day he’d had and the way he was this evening; she wouldn’t stand in front of him in the doorway and say,
Well? Did you ask about a mortgage?

And he’d even been in a bank, too. Not, he thought, that he would go to the Toscana Provinciale for money, not even if that clever, watchful girl in the glasses – what had been her name? – was the manager rather than just a
sportellista
. What was she doing in such a place?

With a wrench he tore himself away from his memory of the wary bank teller – Delfino, that was it, DELFINO Roxana on her little badge – unwilling, back to the matter in hand.

‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said to Luisa’s broad back, as she lit the gas under the chopped vegetables. ‘I – it slipped my mind. The bank.’ A battered fan stood on the counter beside her, wafting the scent of onions.

She washed her hands under the cold tap, rubbing them over and over, before she turned back to him.

‘It’s all right,’ she said easily, and he saw her look quickly around the room, taking in the old melamine-fronted cabinets, the dent in the stainless-steel sink. It showed all the signs of having been thoroughly cleaned; getting home from work an hour before him, at six-thirty, she must have set to straight away. To reassure herself that, with a quick brush-up, this place wasn’t so bad after all, they could stick it out?

Or perhaps the first step towards getting it spruced up for sale. Probably both: that’d be like his little strategist, to kill two birds with one stone.

‘Tough day?’ she asked, sitting down and taking a sip of the drink he’d poured her, a glass of Crodino in which the ice had already melted to slivers; she tipped the glass from side to side, to hear them chink.

He nodded, hesitating. Not quite ready to tell it all. Then remembered: he’d done something right.

‘I spoke to Giuli, though,’ he said.

‘And?’ Luisa set her hands on her hips.

‘And you were right, she’s got a boyfriend, and it was him she went to the seaside with. Computer geek, by the sound of it. A technician.’

‘Well,’ said Luisa drily. ‘That’s better than – it might be.’

Better than nightclub bouncer or pimp or debt collector or homeless junkie, was what she meant. The choices Giuli had made in her previous life did not bear too much contemplation.

Sandro frowned. Lunch with Giuli seemed a long time ago, eclipsed by the memory of that battered body decaying in the gaseous heat of the ring road. He remembered her saying,
I know a bad guy when I see one
.

‘Actually,’ he said cautiously, ‘I think we should – well, maybe not stay out of it completely, but at least – give her the benefit of the doubt. I think she knows what she’s doing.’

Luisa gave him a long look. ‘Fine,’ she said at last, and he saw her struggle to say it. She sighed, said it again. ‘Fine. You’re probably right.’

‘His name’s Enzo,’ he said. ‘I think she’ll bring him over, eventually. For inspection.’

‘Right,’ said Luisa, and he could see that for the moment, she had decided to be satisfied. ‘So tell me,’ she said. ‘About the bad day. Did you find him?’

‘Ah.’ Sandro rubbed his eyes, suddenly exhausted, and smelled the day on his hands. Traces that stirred disquiet in him: aftershave and disinfectant, soot and car exhaust and latex gloves. Traces of the old life; him and Pietro shoulder to shoulder, looking down at human remains. ‘Well, it’s complicated.’

Luisa cocked her head, a gesture he knew of old, that meant,
So tell me
.

And he told her, leaving nothing out. As he described Brunello’s wife, dignified in her crumpled linen shift, he saw Luisa’s mouth twist. Whose side could you come down on, after all?

‘Bring her here,’ she said, getting to her feet, rubbing her back. She had grown stiff and sore listening to the story, and the air was rich with the scent of the meat sauce that had cooked while they talked. Luisa crossed to the window and leaned out, looking for a breath of air. ‘Bring the girl here, after. I’ll take the day off.’

*

The internet café off the wide expanse of the Piazza dell’Carmine was where they usually met, not a glamorous place but it suited Giuli fine. It was one of the things she liked about Enzo, that he didn’t notice his surroundings, really. He would sit across the small table and just look at her while he talked, as if nothing else was there. Focused, that was Enzo.

He wasn’t late – Enzo was never late. Giuli was early, because she simply felt like being alone a bit. Only ten minutes early, that would be plenty.

Anna Niescu, she had learned, was tougher than she looked. After Sandro had gone, she had stayed, silent, pressed against Giuli on the wide
loggia
, for ten minutes at least, and Giuli had felt how still she was, like an animal hiding from a predator, conserving her strength. And then, as though something had come to a conclusion, she had quite abruptly stood up.

Giuli had followed her, not daring to speak because anything might be the wrong thing to say. In the big, old-fashioned hotel kitchen – a dresser, a wide iron range, a big marble-topped table – she had followed helplessly as Anna wiped surfaces and put bread in a cloth bag, cheese in the fridge. Eventually Giuli had been allowed to put away the scoured pans waiting on the draining board and only because she had not been able to watch as Anna staggered under their weight and had physically removed them from her.

Then at eight Anna had said, ‘I go to bed now.’ As though she was still living out in the countryside with her
contadini
, and dusk was bedtime.

Giuli had followed her there, too, without being asked. Her room was at the end of a corridor of guests’ rooms, and might have been mistaken for a cupboard, its door was so narrow; Giuli had to blink to believe that Anna had managed to slip through it herself. It had one small high window, a single bed, a wardrobe and a wooden chair. Looking at the single bed, Giuli had wondered – not for the first time since she’d met Anna Niescu, and uncomfortably – how she had conceived, this child with her little child’s bed. And not so much how – because, she could almost hear Sandro saying wryly,
it would be in the usual way
– but where.

Anna had turned and seen her in the doorway behind her, but hadn’t told her to go. She had taken something from under her pillow and gone out, through another door; there had been the brief sound of running water, and cautious, uncertain movements, as though once finding herself alone she had lost all sense of where she was. Giuli had sat down on the wooden chair and waited until Anna came back, in a cotton nightdress with faded flowers, a market-stall thing meant for a woman three times her age that made her look even younger. Without meeting Giuli’s eye, she had got into bed.

For a long time neither of them had said anything. Moonlight had come through the long window and fallen on the old tile of the floor, turning the deep waxed red to black. Anna had lain quite still, curled on her side. It had taken her breathing a long time to slow, while Giuli listened. Trying not to think of what would be going through Anna’s mind. And then, just as Giuli had thought sleep was overtaking the girl, she had given an awful start. Struggled up on one elbow, as desperately as if she had been drowning, pleading in incoherent half sentences.
No, no
, she had been saying.
No, no, don’t go, don’t
.

Putting out a hand to quiet her, Giuli had said, softly, ‘Anna, shh. Anna.’

Anna had groped blindly for the hand and Giuli had seen from her face, blank in the moonlight, that she had not quite been awake. She’d wanted to say, it’s all right, but it would have been a lie. So she had said, ‘It’s Giuli. I’m here.’

‘Giuli,’ Anna had repeated, first wonderingly, then with dull realization. She had lowered herself back on to the pillow, but held on to Giuli’s hand.

‘You’ve got your baby,’ Giuli had said. ‘Think of the baby.’

On her side and staring into the darkness Anna had moved her free hand down, across her belly, hesitantly, as though it was new to her, this weight she had been carrying around for eight months.

She had spoken, quietly. ‘He said the nursery would be ready in time.’

Giuli had seen that the girl’s eyes were open, and that something gleamed on her cheek. Love, she’d thought; Sandro had been right all along. What was I doing, believing in love? And rage had bubbled inside her, at Anna’s man and his lying.

‘He wouldn’t have killed himself.’ Anna’s voice had not been defensive, or angry, but calm. ‘I know he wouldn’t. You didn’t know him, none of you did. He was – like a boy, when he heard about the baby. He was so happy.’

Giuli had held still, keeping back her anger.

‘Where was it?’ she had asked softly. ‘The apartment? The – the nursery?’

By way of distraction but also because it had niggled at her. Was this bank manager a man so wealthy he could set up another home? Would it be a mistress’s penthouse, or would he park Anna, too naive to know any better, in a tenth-floor
monolocale
overlooking a trailer park? She’d said,
like a boy;
boy wasn’t a bank manager. And all this talk of a pay rise coming his way? He was into something dodgy, one way or the other.

‘I’ll show you,’ Anna had said, her voice drifting. ‘I’ll take you there.’

‘You sleep,’ Giuli had said.

‘You could see the hills,’ Anna had murmured. ‘A beautiful view. Needed some work, he was going to do the work, just to make the nursery, that was all it needed. The bathroom had marble tiles and the bed had a blue cover. He couldn’t find the light switch.’

She’d turned a little in the bed, and her grip on Giuli’s hand had loosened.

Giuli had wondered if it was wrong to let her go to sleep, dreaming of this house in the hills that would never be. ‘Yes,’ she had said.

‘You can go now,’ Anna had said, faraway now. ‘You can go, and I’ll take you there in the morning. I remember the way.’ Her eyes had drooped. ‘I remember the way.’

The reception desk had been unattended as Giuli had passed on her way out; she’d found the Russian on the terrace under the
loggia
, smoking. Her eyes were blue as ice under black eyelashes, and she’d still looked angry.

‘I’ll come back in the morning for her,’ Giuli had said.

She’d fished in her pockets for one of Sandro’s cards; he’d put her mobile number on it when they had them reprinted at the beginning of the year. She’d held it out, and the Russian had taken it, in the same hand as the cigarette, held it disdainfully between thumb and little finger. She hadn’t looked at it.

‘Call either one of us, if she – well, if she needs us. If she wakes in the night, or anything.’

The Russian had looked at Giuli levelly. ‘My name is Dasha,’ she had said. ‘I don’t have card.’

Despite herself, Giuli had smiled; Dasha hadn’t quite smiled back, but almost.

At the rickety lift in the corner of the room Giuli had turned. ‘Did you meet him?’

‘Him?’ Still standing in the door to the
loggia
, Dasha had leaned back to stub out the cigarette on one of the terrace’s ashtrays.

‘The baby’s father.’ Giuli had watched her. ‘I mean – he’s real?’ Stupid thing to say. What was this, the immaculate conception? But there was something unreal here.

‘Real?’ The Russian had looked almost amused. ‘I suppose. Not meet him, no. Not an introduction. I see him in the street with her once or twice. Not ghost, if that is what you mean.’ And she let out a surprising cackle. ‘Not Holy Ghost.’

‘He didn’t mind being seen?’ Giuli had turned right around to face the girl, and she’d been able to hear the lift cranking wheezily up behind her. Dasha had shrugged.

‘Not so much, no. On Piazzale Michelangelo, out in open, sure. They were not hiding.’

There had been something in her eyes, though: something. She had shifted, looked away. Hiding something.

The internet café had fierce air-con, and now Giuli shivered, remembering. There was something not right about this, the married bank manager holding hands with his pregnant mistress on the Piazzale Michelangelo, among the thronging tourists. Was that it? Tourists were strangers, here today, gone tomorrow. Or because his wife was safely stowed at the seaside, along with most of his colleagues, no one to catch them? She got out her phone and texted Sandro, quickly.
Shd talk 2 Russian at hotel?

But the case was closed, wasn’t it? Give or take a few loose ends.

Enzo would be here soon, and Giuli was glad. She was hungry, all over again.

In the café’s lurid red and green evening lighting, heads bowed intently over computer screens, a couple in a corner, she looked up and there he was, at the door, her sweetheart. She watched his face light up as he saw her; she checked her watch. Ten o’clock, bang on.

*

In her bedroom, Roxana lay very still and listened. This was the room she had slept in for her entire childhood – and now, it felt, most of her adult life too. She should feel safe here, if she felt it anywhere. She knew the sounds – the cicadas, the river, the distant roar of the motorway interchange. She even knew what it sounded like when someone broke through the downstairs bathroom window, and knew what to do. She wasn’t stupid, but she wasn’t neurotic, whatever Ma said. The trouble was, Ma had gone through her life thinking – knowing – that there was always someone else to deal with stuff like this. There had always been Dad, and now there was Roxana, and Roxana had no one.