Dead Season (17 page)

A man would be coming out from Prato tomorrow evening to sort out the back gate. Some handyman-cum-locksmith, she’d been all through the Yellow Pages and hadn’t been able to find one closer, not at nine at night in August.

Of course, she had had to wait until Violetta was asleep and snoring first; Ma had a bat’s ear for panic. Roxana had come back in from the garden with the dead torch, pausing for a long moment on the veranda to collect herself, to put an expression of wry irritation on her face.

‘Bloody thing,’ she’d said, setting the torch down on the kitchen table. ‘My fault, I should have bought batteries.’

Ma had looked at her oddly, as if she had decided to wipe the whole thing from her mind and didn’t want to hear otherwise. ‘Yes,’ she had said, complacently, setting down a bowl of salad with tuna and sweetcorn. And that had been that: they’d eaten stolidly in the heat. Although when a car had backfired a couple of streets away, Ma had looked wild-eyed, just for a second.

‘I’ll make you a camomile,’ Roxana had said, to hasten her to bed, and obediently she had padded upstairs. Roxana had heard the creak of the old fan coming on.

She could hear it now, whirring across the landing, and Ma’s soft snore behind it. From somewhere on the slopes below the Certosa, the soft warning hoot of an owl.

She had made herself stay and listen long and hard. Was there someone there? She would not have let Ma think everything was well otherwise; she would, whatever her low opinion of their capabilities, have called the police and not a locksmith if she had had a single doubt. Wouldn’t she?

But as she lay stiff in bed under the smooth sheet, she knew she was on full alert: all her senses straining. She had to switch them off, one by one; there were techniques she’d learned, an age ago, when studying for her final exams. Tense, then let go, each muscle, one after the other. The last to go were the fine muscles of the face. She could picture herself frowning fiercely in the dark, brows knitted. She ordered them to relax.

And she lay, her features smoothed out, perfectly still. But Claudio Brunello was dead. Why?

All was not well, out there in the world. Along the dark highway into town, behind the shuttered glass of the bank, up on the hillside overlooking the sea where Brunello’s kids were sleeping. It was all wrong.

There was no reason. Roxana had always believed Claudio Brunello to be a good man, a decent person. People like him did not die like this, suddenly, violently, bizarrely. Either she had been wrong about him or – something else was involved. There were things she didn’t know yet, but she would find out, that was all. There were questions to ask Marisa, there were people she needed to find. Against all the odds, Roxana felt the relaxation technique begin to work. She let her mind drift, so as not to fight it.

And so she didn’t recognize him, when his face appeared to her, just as she edged over the border between sleep and wakefulness, just an agglomeration of shade and light, like the image of Christ on the Turin Shroud, pale cheekbones and pools of dark for eyes. She didn’t know him at first, and by the time she did, it was too late, and she was asleep.

*

On her bed in the moonlight, Anna Niescu came gradually upright, her small hands flat on either side of her belly. She breathed out, slowly, through a mouth set with some indeterminate effort. In the pale, flat light it was hard to tell whether she was awake or asleep as she looked around her, searching the room’s shadowy corners for something, or someone.
Don’t go
, she murmured.
Don’t
.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

Thursday

A
T THE KITCHEN WINDOW
, dressed only in undershorts at six-thirty in the morning, Sandro frowned down at the mobile, handed to him by Luisa.

He had heard her on the landline earlier, which was why he was out of bed.

‘What on earth are you up to?’ he’d said, padding into the
salotto
, cold as the grave in winter, clammy this morning, but a degree or two cooler, at least, than the bedroom. We should sleep in here, he thought, looking blearily around the good furniture, the shiny silk of the hard sofa and upholstered chairs. Like a dream half remembered, the slideshow image of a balcony and hills seen through a lopsided window came to him, and he had the impulse to junk all this, mirror, uncomfortable chairs, sideboard: the lot. Luisa stood by the small round polished table, her hand on the receiver she had just replaced.

‘I’m calling in sick,’ she said.

‘At this hour?’

‘There’s an answering machine,’ she said, and then he noticed the dark circles under her eyes.

‘You’re not really sick,’ he said, fear ballooning inside him.

His wife folded her arms. ‘I said I’d stay home today, didn’t I?’

‘You look wiped out,’ he said. He could feel sweat between his shoulder blades.

And then Luisa sighed. ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’

‘That’s all?’ He didn’t move, daring her to look away.

‘Yes,’ she said, and the trace of impatience calmed him. ‘The heat, you know. And – what you told me. This girl. The father of her child.’

‘Hell,’ said Sandro, ‘I should never have told you.’

He himself had slept for the first night in weeks: accumulated exhaustion, perhaps. Or having a job to do, again. It looked as if he’d managed somehow to shift the fallout directly to Luisa: his better half.

‘That was stupid of me,’ he said, properly contrite, and she let him put his arms around her briefly. He breathed in the musk smell of her sweat. When she pushed him away, she caught him smiling, foolishly.

Sandro shrugged under her gaze. And she clicked her tongue, turning for the door, but he could see she didn’t mind, not too much.

‘It’s been pinging away,’ she said, picking up the phone from the fruit bowl in the kitchen. ‘That didn’t help, during the night.’

He must have slept like a log. The phone was set to keep bleeping intermittently to let him know he hadn’t read a message. He had no idea how to change it, just as he had no idea why it was on that setting in the first place. People got their children to sort stuff like that out – people like him did, anyway. Old farts. He’d ask Giuli.

He frowned down at the message.
Shd talk 2 Russian at hotel.
He had no idea what she was on about.

‘Give it here,’ said Luisa, reading his thoughts, or some of them. Deftly she moved her thumb over the screen, before giving it back.

‘The message was from Giuli,’ he said slowly.

‘You’re meeting her at the hotel,’ said Luisa.

Right, thought Sandro, OK. That hotel. That Russian. And the grim day loomed ahead; he sat down at the kitchen table, weary already.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She thinks I should talk to the receptionist there.’ Perhaps she’d seen them together; but it was too late for all that now. He sighed.

Luisa set two glasses of water on the table and sat next to him. By the sink he could see the remains of the bottle of wine he’d drunk last night; he could feel it behind his eyes, too.

‘Want me to come?’ she asked.

The light was better in here and he could see that she was all right. She put out a bare arm; the soft skin above the elbow looked vulnerable to him, and for a second he wanted to put his face against it. ‘You get some sleep,’ he said.

‘Rubbish,’ said Luisa. ‘Me, sleep in the day?’

He smiled at that. Luisa had never even taken a siesta, in all the time they’d been together. Not even when she’d been pregnant. Early to bed, early to rise, but no lying about while the sun was up.

Giuli smiled broadly when she saw it was both of them. They’d arranged to meet at a bar called Ricchi in Santo Spirito. There were barely half a dozen market stalls in the piazza, but the bar was busy enough, just because it was open. It would close next week, announced a sign on the door, until i September, but for the moment its metal tables were laid out under the square’s dusty elms. A few old ladies sat out there, with hardly enough energy between them to gossip, but gamely trying all the same. Gossip being like coffee or wine: what was the point in breathing if you couldn’t indulge in life’s pleasures?

Ricchi didn’t wait on its tables, so you didn’t get charged extra to sit at them, and Giuli was parked in a corner, as far as she could get from the beady-eyed senior citizens.

Her bag on her knee, Luisa ran a finger over the unwiped tabletop, and with a roll of her eyes Giuli went inside to order.

‘What?’ said Luisa, defensively.

‘Give them a break,’ said Sandro, smiling. ‘It’s August. A public service to stay open at all. We can’t all have your standards.’

It was because she wasn’t working. Luisa got fidgety with nothing to do.

She looked around the square and Sandro saw her take in a big stall selling cheap clothing, Chinese-made, brought in through Osmannoro, where they all lived. The smiling, chunky Chinese girl manning it was exchanging fluent banter with a customer. Two aproned
contadini
dozing behind near-identical displays of oozing figs, knotted onions and ripe, misshapen tomatoes. A trestle with old bits of brassware: there were lampstands, candlesticks and ornate chandeliers.

‘Not a bad spot,’ Luisa conceded. Sandro knew she was thinking about the flat in Porta San Miniato, and how close it would be. ‘Nor’s San Ambrogio,’ he said. Their own local market, much bigger, more bustling, with a covered meat and fish hall. Luisa pursed her lips.

The biggest pitch was allocated to a fruit and vegetable stall, selling more exotic imported items, olive oil, bottled water and greenhouse lettuce, as well as local produce. Liliana Granchi. Everyone knew purple-haired, handsome Liliana; knew her sullen daughter-in-law, her unruly grandsons, her co-workers on the stall who she sent running here and there with a sharp look. Her soft words were reserved for her little curly-headed poodle, sat perched on his cushion in an orange box. The stall had a pyramid of oranges, even in August.

‘That’s where they met,’ said Sandro, nodding at the oranges. Giuli was at his elbow, with a tray, two cups of coffee, a
spremuta d’arancia
, and a cloth for the table. She set it down.

‘Where?’ said Luisa, seizing the cloth before Giuli could, and working it into the table’s corners. When she’d done she set down the drinks.

‘Buying oranges,’ said Sandro, nodding at the stall. ‘Last November.’ He might have talked to Liliana, too, but events had overtaken him. Which reminded him. ‘What was that about the Russian?’ he asked, taking the mobile out of his pocket and feeling the smooth weight of it in his hand. ‘The message you sent me.’

Luisa tutted just barely, at the memory of a broken night. She pushed the orange juice towards Giuli with a frown.

‘I don’t know,’ Giuli replied, despondent. ‘Too late now. It’s just – well, she saw him. We only had that terrible image on the mobile, and she’d actually seen him.’

‘Did you think he might not exist?’ He spoke wryly, because they both knew there was evidence that Anna Niescu had had a lover. He felt a pang, at the thought of the big melon-belly, and what effect it might have on Luisa.

‘Come on,’ said Luisa, knowing what he was thinking. She drained her coffee. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

At the great wooden street door to the Loggiata, they squabbled, briefly. ‘D’you think I – we should wait down here?’ said Giuli nervously. ‘Just you go up?’

Luisa took charge. ‘We’re all here now,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose she’s going to be frightened by us, under the circumstances.’

And so up they all went, squeezed into the tiny lift. It was eight-thirty.

There was no sign of the Russian receptionist, just an impossibly ancient woman behind the desk, who looked at them with filmy eyes and an unfocused smile. To Sandro’s surprise, Luisa immediately greeted her with respectful formality, asking after her health, commiserating over the heat.

Giuli and Sandro sat on hard chairs from the small collection in the corner that served as a foyer, and waited while Luisa talked, working her way around, with the right courtesies, to stating their business. They saw the old woman indicate the door to the
loggia
, Luisa bowing thanks, turning back towards them.

Sandro raised an eyebrow.

‘Serafina Capponi. My mother knew her,’ Luisa said, settling herself between them. ‘She owns this place. She used to shop at Frollini, in the old days. I haven’t seen her in years; I’d forgotten about her.’

‘She doesn’t look as if she’s out and about much,’ said Giuli.

‘I thought they might be exploiting the girl,’ he said in an undertone to Luisa.

Luisa frowned. ‘I doubt that. It’s a funny old place.’ She looked around, at the wide foyer’s odd combination of dusty magnificence and tat, a vast, gilded mirror set over a cheap veneer table. ‘They’re all in the same boat in this place, just lame ducks. Just limping along.’

‘No children?’ Luisa shook her head.

They all looked at the old lady at once then, all with the same thought.
And when she dies?
The Russian, Anna, the other staff, the handful of guests – they’d all be out on the street, while some distant cousins fought over the property. The hotel’s owner smiled with vague benevolence at their faces turned towards her, her head almost imperceptibly nodding.

The door to the
loggia
opened and a slow-moving elderly couple emerged. Behind them was Anna Niescu, holding a tray, waiting patiently for them to move along. She saw the three visitors, and stopped.

Sandro watched Luisa’s face, but she was too quick for him.

She was on her feet and hurrying, hurrying to get to the girl, and seizing the tray and its cups and saucers and stacked breadbaskets before Anna went over and it all went with her. Because she’d seen in an instant what he saw too late, that this – the sight of them, waiting with their anxious, knowing faces – was almost too much for Anna Niescu. She was close to collapse.

‘I’m Sandro’s wife,’ said Luisa, taking the tray and passing it to Sandro, guiding the girl on to a rickety cane sofa while the old lady looked from them to the lift door in vague panic. ‘It’s all right.’