The Viper Page 10

  As he put the phone away, he turned to see Martine Kaufmann emerge from the door to her studio, bent over. She was hauling the bags of old clothes out on to the pavement. He felt a weary nudge of conscience at the sight.

  ‘Miss Kaufmann?’ She straightened stiffly. He wasn’t sure if the look she gave him contained reproof or if that was his imagination. He sighed. ‘Maybe I could help you with those?’

  She was rubbing her hands where the plastic ties on the bags had already cut into her palms. More gently, he said, ‘Why don’t I take them over to the collection centre for you? Is it far?’

  She put her hands in her pockets, regarding him, stiffly upright, and he remembered her again, more slender all those years ago, but the determination intact. And then abruptly she inclined her head, gracious.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you. They collect them at that little convent beyond the Carmine – do you know the one?’ He did, and it was on the way back to the office. ‘It’s been – it feels like it’s been a long morning. That’s very kind.’ And with another stiff nod, she retreated inside, leaving the bags on the pavement.

  He regretted the gesture before he’d reached the end of the street, and by the time he got to the convent his hands were raw. In the side-room a swarthy man in a brown janitor’s coat took the bags from him with a grunt, glancing at the tags. There were bins marked up for different items – shoes, overcoats, jeans – and overtaken by idle curiosity, Sandro lingered.

  ‘Is Miss Kaufmann a regular contributor?’ he said and the janitor looked at him, not understanding.

  ‘Contributor? It’s her charity. She organises everything, picks up bags every couple of weeks.’ He undid the bags and upended them on to the counter. ‘Some orphanage or something.’

  What had he expected? He looked down at the heaped clothes. The bags contained just what Kaufmann had said, things only teenagers would wear. Skimpy sweaters, jeans, cheap shoes. Market-stall stuff.

  His phone buzzed with a message from Pietro. You done? I’ve got sandwiches. See you at the car in ten.

  Martine Kaufmann was doing some kind of penance. Charity work? What wrong had she done, and when?

  Sandro turned and retraced his steps.

  Chapter Ten

  MERCIFULLY LUISA WAS BACK HOME, had taken more of the medication they’d given her at the hospital with a pot of camomile tea and feeling closer to normal than she had in days, when Sandro called. Sitting at the round table in the dim kitchen with her hands at the little teapot, listening to the children in the street outside.

  How old would she have been now? Their Beatrice, their baby. Approaching thirty-three, and perhaps with children of her own. A ball was bouncing rhythmically out there, and the children’s voices were like music. Then on the table the mobile buzzed.

  He launched right into it, his morning and Martine Kaufmann. ‘Runs a sculpture studio in San Niccolo,’ he said. ‘But it’s all about good works, her life. What is it they’re all trying to clean out of their lives? Gorgone and his wellness centres. She runs some children’s charity. I just hauled a ton of old clothes over there.’

  There was a silence, and she heard him wondering why she had not yet said anything. She took a deep breath and decided to leave it, to say nothing – yet.

  ‘I’m worried about Giuli,’ she said. ‘I – we just had a coffee together in town.’

  A last resort. ‘What?’ She could hear panic in his voice and wished she’d just come clean. ‘What do you think’s wrong? Should I go up there, back to the office?’

  ‘I think she’d know you were keeping tabs on her – don’t do that,’ said Luisa hurriedly. The last thing she wanted was those two conferring. ‘She’s – she just seems so tired all the time. And weepy, and pale.’ All true.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She thinks it’s the menopause.’

  For some reason the thought made Luisa want to burst into tears but all she said was, ‘Oh.’

  He heard it in her voice, though. ‘It’s you I’m worried about,’ he said. ‘You were white as a sheet this morning.’

  ‘Nothing gets past you, does it?’ she said, and it came to her as easy as anything, the white lie. Something about a scratch in the rose garden and she thought it was infected, she’d gone in to the emergency room and they’d given her antibiotics. There was silence: he accepted it.

  ‘Where are you?’ she asked, hearing the hiss of steam.

  ‘Piazza Tasso, waiting for Pietro.’ He cleared his throat. ‘We’re going up to Sant’Anna now,’ he said and she could hear it in his voice. He didn’t want to go: the idea frightened him. But he was brave. She wanted to tell him, it’s okay, I’ve been there, it’s just a hillside, but he mustn’t know she’d been there first.

  Something occurred to her: a way.

  ‘You’ll never guess who was being admitted,’ she said, ‘when I was in the emergency room for my leg.’

  ‘Who?’ His voice was sharp with anxiety and she hurried on.

  ‘Benedetta Salieri,’ she said. ‘I spoke to – her half-brother, is it? A man called Bartolini. Lives in the Salieri house with the old mother – and Benedetta too, I guess. Her marriage fell apart, he told me. She’s – Benedetta’s – unstable is what they call it. Mentally unstable. And the old lady’s –’

  ‘Losing her memory,’ said Sandro. ‘I heard that. What was Benedetta in for? Did you talk to her?’

  ‘No, I –’ Luisa hesitated, not wanting to admit it had been Bartolini she’d recognised, not Benedetta. ‘She was in a bit of a state. I think it might have been an overdose, I’m not quite … Anyway, the main thing is she’s going to be all right.’

  Then mercifully, just as she felt herself entangled in her own stupid deception, there was a clatter behind him, traffic noise as if a door had opened, and Sandro said, ‘Look, Pietro’s here. Call you later, okay?’

  Luisa had to get up and pace a little after he’d gone. This was so unusual, keeping something from Sandro, it made her heart beat too fast. To distract herself she went to the medicine cabinet to put away the dressings they’d given her in the emergency room and to make sure they had iodine and sticking plasters. There it all was, neatly stacked, carefully maintained. Luisa went through it regularly to throw away medicines past their date. She lifted out a tube of ointment for mouth ulcers. She’d been afflicted with them at one stage of her chemo: she remembered that vividly now, those days in dark rooms in pain, and her mouth dried at the memory. Although she had an urge to throw the tube out, she checked the date carefully and put it back in.

  Although the name had meant nothing to her – it wasn’t as though she’d been introduced forty years ago – she had googled Martine Kaufmann that morning. An indistinct mugshot, halfhidden behind a large sculpture in a bright studio. She wondered if the Princess Salieri had known any of them had still been hanging around all this time later. By the sound of it, she would have been past caring.

  She drew up her trousers: the skin around the dressing was no redder, at least. It was not hot to the touch. She wanted to peel back the gauze and look but the dressing was freshly applied so she let the trouser-leg down again. She went to the window and looked down: the boys with the ball were leaning against the opposite wall looking at something on their phones.

  She thought she would call Frollini, her old boss, with his silver hair and his cufflinks and his flirtatious manner. He would know what was going on with the Salieri family. He would know Bartolini, surely? Would he wonder why she was asking? He would. But Luisa just needed to keep her head. The thought popped into it that this was Johanna Nielsson from beyond the grave, still causing trouble. Stirring things up. What had they done down there to cause this so many years later?

  Frollini answered straight away. ‘Enrico?’ she said, suddenly nervous. But he sounded absurdly delighted to hear from her. A drink? But of course. He insisted that they meet at Paskowksi in Piazza Repubblica at – when? – Luisa could hear him calculating, just as she had heard Sandro.
The two men she knew like the back of her hand. Six. Which she knew would allow him to get home to his wife for dinner without an eyebrow raised. Not that there was anything for her to raise her eyebrows over and never had been, for all Frollini was still pretending he had a special bond with his ex-vendeuse.

  Luisa sighed and reached into the street to pull her shutters closed.

  *

  Giuli stood on the Via del Parioncino and looked up at the long windows on the first floor of number three. The telephone on which the child had called her was registered here, in the name of Ticino. It was a good address, which was both reassuring and annoying. Reassuring because, statistically at least, the children of the wealthy were less likely to be ill-treated than those of the poor. They were less likely to be left at home alone, less likely to be malnourished, to truant from school, less likely to be frightened and anxious. This was down to money.

  Would Giuli have had a better upbringing if her mother had been middle class and comfortably off? Sure she would, but then again, it couldn’t really have been worse. On the pavement, in the blue shadows of late afternoon, Giuli looked up at the shuttered windows.

  Pietro’s voice, calling from Sandro’s car, Sandro cursing in the background about the potholes in time with the old car’s rattle, had conveyed respect for the address also. ‘Look, Giuli,’ he’d begun anxiously, ‘you won’t barge in mob-handed, will you? I mean, be discreet. These people,’ he meant the wealthy inhabitants of the Tornabuoni district, ‘they don’t take kindly –’

  ‘I won’t say how I got the address,’ she said, knowing where he was heading with this. ‘I won’t say anything at all if I can get some kind of reassurance from the neighbours or whatever.’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ said Pietro. ‘It’s not San Frediano, you know, or even down where you are, you and Enzo in your newbuild. I bet you’ve already got nosy neighbours down there, haven’t you?’

  He was right. A plump short woman with shiny black hair and three noisy little boys who’d moved in downstairs in the spring had already started hanging out on her front doorstep, calling stuff to Giuli as she passed. Nothing mean, just, God, this weather in the summer when the temperature had risen steeply and neither of them had the money to leave for the seaside. And who’d have kids when hauling her smallest out of the street by the scruff of his neck. The preparatories for establishing a neighbourly relationship: next she’d be asking if Giuli had kids, even though she knew full well there were none. Giuli had just agreed obediently. She thought the woman was called Gemma, and she hadn’t seen a husband.

  ‘No,’ Pietro had said, raising his voice over Sandro murmuring something in the background, engine noise indicating that they were going up a steep bumpy road. ‘You don’t get neighbours as such in those areas. Either they don’t even live there at all – they’re in Gstaad or Sardinia and just drop in for a bit of shopping – or they’re foreign, or they’re above hanging out of the windows.’

  No one was hanging out the window on the Via del Parioncino, which was in any case a tiny street, three doors long, that united the Via del Parione with the Via del Purgatorio. The street of purgatory: even Giuli with her rudimentary knowledge of Christianity knew that hell looked inviting next to purgatory. Number three was on the corner.

  None of the shutters was even open in any of the buildings on the narrow street. Nervously, Giuli approached, found the buzzer for Ticino and rang. Listened. Nothing.

  She felt only relief. This was an elderly lady babysitting her granddaughter. Would they be sitting inside in the dark on a fine cool afternoon? No. They’d be out in the park, the Cascine or over the river to the Strozzi gardens or the Boboli. The old lady pushing the child in a stroller or holding her hand. Or the daughter would have come for her – it was coming up to five o’clock, after all. There was something in that thought, though, that set up a ticking of anxiety in Giuli. What?

  She stepped back, looked up. Still nothing. Took the three steps that would return her to the Via del Parione, where there were shops at least. A designer leather-goods shop, an antique shop, closed like they always were, with a number to ring in the window. A furrier’s, closed still after the summer. She stepped into the leather-goods place. There was an array of shiny handbags on two shelving units, and a huge leather horse, and a very tall, very skinny girl with a long nose on her phone behind the counter. She looked up from the phone only when Giuli was standing right in front of her, not bothering to smile. Probably she was enough of a salesgirl to know Giuli wasn’t in the market for a thousand-euro bag; maybe she hadn’t even needed to look higher than Giuli’s shoes for that insight. Giuli cut to the chase.

  ‘I’m looking for Signora Ticino,’ she said. ‘An old lady in the Via del Parioncino, number three, maybe you know her?’

  The girl shrugged, impassive. ‘Dunno who you mean,’ she said, her eyes flicking down to the phone screen then back up again.

  ‘About, I suppose, sixty-five, seventy?’ said Giuli. Still nothing: the girl looked back up at her without interest. In Giuli’s pocket her own phone buzzed: a text, but she very deliberately did not look at it. ‘You might have seen her out and about with a little girl, her granddaughter, or her daughter?’ Because every Italian noticed children, didn’t they? The girl wasn’t foreign: she even had a Florentine accent. The crinkle of a tiny frown between her eyes, at the waste of her time.

  ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t know any old lady, and I’m not interested in kids. Little sods leaving sticky fingers on my window.’

  ‘So you have seen the granddaughter?’

  The girl’s expression hardened. ‘I told you,’ she said, gesturing at the window. Giuli turned to follow her gaze. ‘I come in here for eleven, I leave at seven, I see customers if they come in and that’s it.’ The window display did indeed block most of the view of the street, but Giuli couldn’t understand how anyone could sit here all day, not go and hang out on the doorstep like normal people. Looking back at the girl, though, she got it. She didn’t need real life – she had her phone. These days that was what was normal.

  ‘Okay,’ said Giuli, defeated. As she stepped out, though, the girl said something, and she turned.

  ‘Round the corner,’ she said. ‘In the next street. I went there once.’

  ‘What?’ said Giuli.

  ‘The shoe guy,’ said the girl, impatient already. ‘What d’you call it – cobbler, guy who mends shoes. He’ll know her, won’t he? Old ladies love those places.’ Her lip curling. ‘I mean, why buy a nice new pair of fashionable shoes when you can spend half an hour gassing with an old guy in a hole in the wall about make do and mend and young people these days.’

  ‘The next street?’ said Giuli, eager, because the long-nosed girl was right.

  ‘Via del Purgatorio,’ said the salesgirl, and with a flick of her hand dismissed Giuli.

  Hurrying across between the tall stone facades, Giuli felt the chill of the approaching evening, although overhead the sky was still blue. Turning the corner, she slowed: up ahead was the battered sign of a boot. The Via del Purgatorio was a dead end, and the cobbler’s was tucked in to the base of the narrowest house she had ever seen. Approaching, she saw that it was open at least – these tiny places could either be open round the clock with the owner sleeping behind the counter, or almost never because the cobbler was an elderly man with a heart condition and no one to cover for him.

  An old guy, maybe in his late sixties but wiry, healthy. In front of him his customer, another old guy, a disreputable black shoe clasped between gnarled fingers, holding forth. On young people these days, as it happened. Young people and their drug taking, on this occasion, a complaint about the things they left littering the pavement. Giuli hovered. The cobbler, glasses on his nose, peered at her a second over his customer’s shoulder, but said nothing. Giuli stepped back: in her pocket the phone buzzed again and she came out on to the street and stepped aside from the doorway.

  It was from Enzo. Don’t forget,
sweetheart, it read. Six p.m., Labo X, Via Verdi.

  What?

  ‘But I cancelled it,’ she murmured to herself, leaning back against the stucco wall with the phone in her hands. But she hadn’t, had she? She had been about to, sitting in the office, but then the phone had rung. Giuli banged her head gently against the wall, two, three times.

  Shit, she thought. Shit, shit.

  She googled the place: Labo X. A website, lots of pictures of smiling faces, a price list. She gulped. She recognised the building, long, modern. A phone number: she dialled.

  ‘Of course, madam, would you like to reschedule?’ A bright female voice.

  ‘Well, I – no, I –’ and suddenly, violently, abruptly Giuli did feel ill. Maybe when I’m feeling better hovered on her lips, prompting a queasy, miserable laugh. ‘I’ll call back …’

  ‘Just to let you know,’ said the female voice, confidentially, ‘we have a policy, and a same-day cancellation does incur a charge, which will be drawn on the card used to make the booking.’

  Giuli felt sick, remembering the price list. ‘A charge?’

  ‘Well, if a cancellation comes this late,’ the voice lowered, apologetic, ‘we charge the full fee.’

  Giuli leaned back against the wall again, and the heat came over her, rising from her breastbone, and sudden, extreme nausea. ‘I – ’ and she gave in. ‘In that case, if I hurry, maybe I –’ She swallowed, squeezed her eyes shut at the thought of doctors and needles. Of what might be wrong. ‘I should be able to make it.’

  The female voice agreed comfortably that that would certainly be the best solution.

  Ah, shit, Giuli thought, hanging up. It was five forty and she had the motorino. It would take her ten minutes or less to get there. She stepped back into the doorway of the cobbler’s but they were still gassing and the look the cobbler gave her this time was wary, as if she was looking unhinged. She felt unhinged. She turned away, reaching for the keys to the motorino.