Dead Season (31 page)

‘Some have them divided off, they make another room,’ said Giovanna. ‘I didn’t need to do that. It’s just me here.’

Anna looked at her, unseeing. ‘That was going to be the nursery,’ she said in a stifled voice, and held out both arms as if taking the room’s measurements. ‘Can I go out?’ she asked abruptly. ‘On to the balcony?’

Giovanna crossed to the glazed doors and pushed them open; the light that fell inside was soft and yellow. It must be getting late. ‘Let me get you a glass of water,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Luisa.

Anna smiled faintly. As if water will solve my problems, she seemed to be saying. But ‘Thank you’ was all she said. She stepped through the doors, and for a second as she disappeared Luisa felt a great surge of panic. What if–what if she—?

But hurrying out on to the balcony all she saw was Anna standing there, solid in the evening sun, her feet set wide apart to give her balance and both hands on the concrete parapet. Giovanna appeared beside them with the glass of water.

‘Have you remembered,’ said Luisa, ‘what it was? What was wrong, when you came here with him?’

Anna was looking at the view: a slice of view at any rate, between another apartment block and some abandoned farm buildings that no doubt would soon become more apartments. A view, not perfect, but good enough, of hills to the south-west, darkening as the sun set behind them, the motorway just audible and intermittently visible. She wondered whether Anna had even heard what she said but then the girl turned her head.

‘I think so,’ she said, the sun glowing apricot on her face. She took the glass of water that Giovanna held out and sipped.

‘Something was wrong?’ said Giovanna. She looked at Luisa questioningly.

‘When her … fiancé brought Anna here to see their apartment,’ she replied.

‘It might be nothing,’ said Anna.

‘What?’ said Luisa.

Anna drained the glass and handed it back. ‘The keys,’ she said. ‘The keys to the apartment.’ She frowned. ‘They weren’t right. He said they were his keys, but—’

‘The keys?’ Luisa tried to remember what Anna had told her about the keys. There’d been something. ‘The – the Ferrari keyfob? Was it that?’

‘That,’ said Anna, nodding. ‘That – he would never have had such a keyring, he wasn’t interested in cars, not at all. He didn’t even have a car, said he didn’t see why you would need one in a city.’

‘Right,’ said Luisa, waiting.

‘There was a label on the keys,’ said Anna carefully.

‘A label? What kind of label?’

‘A little card, tied with cotton, like you might have in a shop, you know, a little price tag.’

Luisa frowned, head on one side, trying to picture it, knowing there was something about this picture she would recognize, eventually – only Giovanna got there first.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘that would be the agent, wouldn’t it? The estate agent’s tag, they put a tag on the key when they’re selling a property, telling you who it belongs to? What property it belongs to. So they don’t get them mixed up.’

‘But it was his place,’ said Anna, and her lower lip stuck out, like a stubborn child’s. ‘He said it was his.’

The older women looked at her.

‘He didn’t know where anything was,’ said Luisa softly.

‘They’ve been trying to sell it for years,’ Giovanna added, her head on one side as she watched Anna. ‘It’s on the market.’

‘Maybe he bought it,’ said Anna defiantly. ‘Maybe he was renting it.’ There was a silence, in which Luisa tried to think how to soften this.

‘He … it’s possible he just … he was just … borrowing it,’ she said at last.

Just as he borrowed Claudio Brunello’s identity. Buying time.

From below them there was a dull thud and an explosion of fine debris blew out through a window, dusting the trees. All three women leaned down to look, and the powder-white face of a man in overalls looked back up at them.

‘Hi,’ said Giovanna breezily.

He raised a hand tentatively and said something guttural in a language none of them understood.

‘Got the builders in,’ said Giovanna. ‘Maybe they’ve sold the place at last.’ She looked from Luisa to Anna, then back. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You want to know what’s going on down there? Come on, then.’

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

B
Y THE TIME
L
UISA
walked back through her door on the Via dei Macci, it was dark outside.

Giuli had been making excuses for Luisa while they waited. ‘You know there’s hardly any phone coverage,’ she’d said. ‘Inside an apartment building, for example, or in a particular street. The Via dei Bardi, for example, that’s a killer. San Niccolo in general, tucked in under the hillside there …’

Sandro had let her talk, fretting silently, barely even picking up on her mention of San Niccolo and what an undesirable place it could be to live.

‘They’ll be fine,’ she had finished up, uncertainly.

‘So why didn’t she leave a note?’

‘You know Luisa,’ Giuli had said, and that was the end of that conversation.

And all Luisa had said when she did return was, ‘Don’t be daft. It’s a Thursday in August, there aren’t even any cars, what were you worried about? That I’d be run over by a watermelon seller?’

Giuli had stood there in that stance again, arms tightly folded against her body, and a frown etched on her face.

‘Not you too?’ said Luisa. ‘Come on.’

It was bravado, though. Sandro knew her too well.

‘It might be August,’ he said, ‘but people seem to still be getting murdered. For nothing, some of them.’

‘People?’ Luisa pulled out a chair and sat with weary resignation. Reluctantly, Giuli let her arms drop and sat down next to her. They looked at him warily.

Sandro wished he could take it back now. ‘Oh, nothing. A mugging, carjacking or something on the south side, Pietro mentioned it.’ Luisa nodded, her face betraying nothing.

‘Where’s Anna?’ asked Giuli.

‘She wanted to go home,’ said Luisa, then let out a dry, small laugh. ‘Home.’ She shook her head. ‘Poor kid. That dismal old place.’

‘It took three hours?’ said Sandro. ‘Just taking her over to Santo Spirito?’

‘Can you get me a glass of water?’ said Luisa mildly. ‘I’m parched.’

And she waited for him to turn his back, he knew, before she said, ‘We went over to the apartment in Firenze Sud. His apartment, supposedly, the one they were going to move into.’

‘All that way on the bus?’ Sandro set down the water and the glass. Sighed and poured.

Luisa’s mouth turned down, just a little. ‘I know,’ she said eventually. ‘Yes, I know. She wanted to go. She wanted to show it to me.’

‘Oh, I tried the estate agent,’ said Sandro, absently. Luisa looked at him. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t back from lunch, they said. Running late, they said he’d call me back. Galeotti. Go on.’

He visualized the man, his flash car. And clients like Marisa Goldman on his books, the agency’s letterhead on her desk at the bank. No wonder he didn’t have time for Sandro. Was Marisa Goldman moving house?

‘He never called, though.’

Luisa sighed.

‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘Giovanna Baldini – I told you about her, right? She was at school with me.’ Sandro nodded, waiting. ‘She lives in the flat above. We went in. We talked to her.’ Luisa took a sip of the water and mopped at her forehead, pale and damp with sweat. ‘She knew a bit about the flat – and – and in the end she got the concierge to talk to us.’

‘The drunk you talked about?’ said Sandro. ‘And?’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘So it turns out, the flat wasn’t his at all.’

Sandro looked at her and realized he had never really believed in Anna’s apartment with its nursery in the first place. What had he thought? That she’d imagined it? Or that her fiancé had? But it did exist.

‘No,’ he said. ‘So?’

‘So it’s been on the market, half furnished, in a terrible state, for years.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘The builders had been sent in, just today.’

‘Sent in by whom?’ Sandro stared at her, trying to work it out. The timing. When had Josef taken Anna to see this flat?

‘The new owners.’ Luisa sighed. ‘It wasn’t easy. You don’t understand, getting information out of these people.’ She pursed her lips. ‘The concierge took twenty minutes of Giovanna bellowing through his keyhole to even come to the door, then he didn’t want us to come in.’ She shifted in her seat. ‘I thought poor Anna was going to throw up in there. I had to make her sit outside in the end.’

‘Is she all right?’ said Giuli. ‘Anna?’

Sandro saw Luisa’s expression, remorse and apprehension mingled. ‘I think so,’ she said wearily. ‘I tried to get her to come here, but she said home was the Loggiata, that’s where he’d come to find her. She’s stubborn.’

You’re all bloody stubborn, thought Sandro, looking from one woman to the other. ‘What did the concierge say?’

‘Well, he blustered,’ said Luisa. ‘I think he spends too much of the day out of it to know a lot. Said the agent had been round last week with two yuppie types. He didn’t know if they’d agreed a price. So we went up and tried to talk to the builders. Only they were Moroccan and none of us speaks French even, let alone the other language they were speaking.’

‘Berber,’ supplied Giuli. Sandro looked at her. ‘What?’ she said. ‘It’s one of the Moroccan languages. Hassan at the Montecarla, that bar, he speaks it.’ Sandro looked back at Luisa, outdone.

‘She’s an asset,’ said Luisa, smiling wearily at Giuli, who now almost blushed. At least, Sandro thought, it was a considerable improvement on the pallor she’d had since she turned up at the riverside bar. And why had she spent so much time in the bathroom?

‘Agreed,’ said Sandro, temporarily putting his anxiety about Giuli to one side. ‘So. The builders?’

‘And it turns out they got asked to do the work this weekend; the deal went through end of last week. That’s all the builders knew, but the yuppies put down a deposit in cash on Monday and they were in.’

Sandro sat. ‘The concierge,’ he said slowly. ‘You told me he was a drunk – but what kind was he? I mean, just a bit of a slob, or all day every day drunk? So he wouldn’t notice if Anna’s fiancé was squatting in one of his apartments?’

‘I talked to Giovanna about that,’ said Luisa. ‘He might be drunk – and she said he usually is out of it – but
she
’s sharp as a tack. Said she’d definitely have known if someone was living in the flat. But the heating and water were off, for a start. She grumbled about it because it meant she had to turn up the heating in her place to compensate over the winter. It wasn’t habitable.’ She sighed. ‘Giovanna walks past the door a couple of times a day, and she’d never seen Josef.’

But if there was one thing Sandro had learned about the man, he was good at keeping a low profile. It wasn’t easy to fall off the radar like that, just the one sighting. As far as they knew he’d broken cover just the once, at the Loggiata, trying to get to Anna? That told Sandro that he was desperate, and scared. Where had he been hiding?

‘You showed her a picture?’

‘Anna had her phone,’ said Luisa, rubbing her eyes. ‘She showed Giovanna.’ Her voice was muffled.

She raised her head, and looked so tired Sandro said gently, ‘All right, angel. You need some rest.’

‘It’s not much of a mugshot,’ said Luisa, ignoring him. ‘But Giovanna was pretty certain. She told Anna off for losing weight since the picture, so she could tell that much.’

‘She has lost weight,’ Giuli put in, frowning. ‘Off her face, for sure.’

Patiently Sandro looked at the two of them, and waited for them to return to the point.

‘So he wasn’t living there,’ he prompted eventually. ‘But he got the keys – from somewhere, for at least two visits, with Anna, maybe more.’

They looked at him, and Sandro got up and went to the window, pushing back the shutters. They thought it was hot inside, but the air that entered was as humid, hot and stagnant as if he’d opened the door on a Turkish bath.

‘Who owned the place, then? Who sold it to the yuppies?’ He looked down along the dirty street, where the lights were beginning to blink yellow. They were beginning to congregate, on the corner: three dreadlocked kids, one dog. As he watched, one of them dropped a can to the pavement and stamped on it with a crack. Not too many yuppies here.

‘Some old couple, years back,’ Luisa said promptly. ‘Bought as an investment, hardly lived in recently, she’s widowed.’

She was watching him. For a moment, the pale, attentive oval of her face looked like a painting to Sandro in the circle of light falling from the wide, low shade.

‘Can’t see an old couple being anything but suspicious of a young Roma,’ he said thoughtfully. Thinking of the old lady at the Loggiata. Reading his mind, Giuli grunted agreement. ‘So how’d he get the keys?’ said Sandro.

‘The keys,’ said Luisa, sitting up straighter, a hand on the table and tapping as she did when she was thinking hard. ‘They were what worried her. Worried Anna. They were wrong.’

‘Maybe he stole them,’ said Giuli.

‘Maybe they were lent to him,’ said Luisa thoughtfully.

Sandro crossed from the window and leaned down over the table, feeling something take shape.

‘By the owner?’

Luisa shook her head slowly. ‘The keys he had weren’t the owners’ set, were they? A Ferrari keyfob? For an old widow?’

Sandro thought of Galeotti showing them round the flat in San Niccolo. His personalized number plate. His Maserati.

Giuli butted in. ‘I’ve heard stories,’ she said.

‘Stories?’ said Sandro.

‘Stories about estate agents,’ she said. ‘And what they get up to in those empty apartments they’re selling.’

‘Yes,’ said Sandro, more tetchily than he meant. ‘We’ve all heard those stories. But what’s the connection with Josef? Where’s he been hiding? And what has he done?’

*

Bitch
, thought Roxana, following her superior’s customized Cinquecento – stripes from end to end, red on white – through the automatic gate. Where did Marisa Goldman get off? Bitch.

It had had Val shaking his head all over again; Marisa was a weird one, all right. It was as if she had no need to make people like her, she was above all that. Even if Maria Grazia was right and she wasn’t as wealthy as she wanted people to think, she certainly acted like it.
Entitled
, that was the word for the way Marisa acted.