Dead Season Read online

  Now the revolving security airlock hissed, the mechanical voice instructed the new arrival to turn around and remove all metallic objects from all pockets, as it always did. Only the odd flustered tourist, having strayed off the beaten track, ever complied; the security capsule’s early morning occupant stood patiently and waited for the door to open.

  Here he is, thought Roxana, almost with disappointment. The bank’s most reliable customer, not quite regular as clockwork any more – it was close to ten by now, rather than the usual eight-fifteen – but—

  It wasn’t him. Signora Martelli, proprietress of the newspaper stand in the tiny Piazza Santa Felicita shuffled through the door, dragging her shopping trolley after her, pale and sweaty with the heat under her habitual full make-up, to deposit her meagre takings. The typical customer: on her last legs, heart trouble, swollen ankles, the summer would probably see her out. Roxana eyed her. She didn’t envy the executors of that will. The old lady wasn’t letting ill health mellow her – she was one of those who had her favourites, Roxana theorized, a working woman who disapproved of other working women. Yet, with a disdainful sniff, she eventually allowed Roxana to investigate the failure of a standing order to pay her water bill. Not quite satisfied by the explanation that an annual review had been specified on the standing order and it had lapsed, she had shuffled off again, leaving the place to return to glum silence, dust motes hanging in the murk.

  The last time they’d been burgled, Roxana had been woken by the intruders and she’d got up, bleary with rage, the heavy immobilizer for the Vespa in her hand, only Ma had appeared in her bedroom doorway white with terror and clung on to her. Roxana had had to stand there, stupid big piece of plastic-sheathed metal in her hand, and do absolutely nothing. Nothing but stroke Mamma’s hair to calm her. They hadn’t even claimed, not wanting the insurance to go higher: Roxana had gone for the cheapest TV she could find this time.

  Too many drugs, too many desperate types, too little respect. Easy pickings from the wealthy tourists bred crime as uncleared garbage bred rats.

  Obsessive-compulsive? Roxana didn’t know where Ma had picked up that little bit of psycho-babble. It was simply that the answer was to be wary, and to pay attention to the detail.

  The boss would laugh at her, gently, for this tendency, but then he’d reassure her that this was precisely why he’d employed her. It was why she was such an asset to the bank, with her thoroughness, her conscientiousness.

  In the silent interior, Roxana couldn’t suppress a sigh. It was also why she was left holding the fort for most of August – that big mummy’s boy Valentino Sordi, currently messing about happily with the coffee machine in the little staff room.

  The offices behind her were dark and empty: the boss’s sanctum – with Direttore in big letters on the frosted glass – and that of his deputy Marisa, who could do no wrong as Gestore, Business e Family with special responsibilities for bringing in commercial customers. The use of English words in Marisa’s title was intended to indicate modernity.

  Were they having an affair? Roxana mused, with nothing better to do than indulge in flights of fantasy. Their holidays were more or less coinciding, even if Marisa had been away a day or two longer than him, and since the boss was supposed to be at the seaside with his family, would he even have time for an affair? Not to mention the fact that Marisa, with her designer clothes and her evenings at the Gallery Hotel drinking cocktails, had a wealthy boyfriend already. But still …

  Could Roxana have been appointed Gestore, Business e Family if she’d played her cards right? Marisa Goldman, the daughter of a Swiss banker and a Torinese countess, had nothing but good breeding and the right wardrobe, a certain aristocratic way with customers. Whereas despite her degree in economics and accounting, and her thesis on the decline in small-scale manufacturing in rural northern Italy, Roxana was still only a sportellista. A teller, a bank clerk, after three years behind the plexiglass, for all the boss’s professions of enthusiasm for her attention to detail.

  And it wasn’t as though the Banca di Toscana Provinciale was one of the big names. No, it was a small, old-fashioned bank, a niche bank, if you wanted to put it kindly, with just ten branches, three of them in Florence. It was her mother’s bank, though, which was more or less why she’d ended up here. It had been where her father had brought her to open her own first bank account – now a source of constant frustration to her because the bank was too small, too obscure, and too backward to have its own cash machines anywhere but in the city, so every time she took money out she had to pay some other bank’s whopping charge and feel a mug all over again. The Banca di Toscana Provinciale wasn’t ready for the modern world, and Roxana had always thought that she was, more than ready. So what was she still doing here?

  She stared at a terrible poster, dog-eared on the outside of the boss’s office. A man with a white grin and a sharp suit, holding out his hand, and customers queueing in the bank, a dream bubble over each one’s head. Kids playing in the garden, a shiny car. Look ahead! the man was saying. Get in line! Who’d come up with that one? Queue up like a drone, borrow more than you can afford, don’t bother to read the small print.

  Roxana’s friends – friend, really, Maria Grazia, whom she hardly saw now she’d moved to Rome to work in film production – told her, get out, the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze had vacancies, a big shiny new building in the north of the city; get an apartment up there, there are some great offers on the new developments. Break free.

  And she would. Roxana told her – over a snatched coffee the last time she visited, Maria Grazia with that worried look in her eyes – she would, only for the moment, there was that tug at her heart that was Mamma.

  ‘She’s only sixty,’ Maria Grazia had said in an exasperated outburst. Then hissed, ‘She could live another thirty years, Roxi. Getting more cranky and ill every year.’

  It was all right for Maria Grazia; her mother, long divorced, was a journalist, she prided herself on being modern, didn’t want her kids hanging on to her apron strings until they were forty or married.

  Suddenly, unwatched, unsupervised, Roxana felt like calling up Maria Grazia and telling her. Asking her what she thought about the only interesting thing that had happened in the bank for months.

  If Maria Grazia was even there. She hadn’t been, Roxana had found with a sense of obscure humiliation, on the last couple of times she’d called – out on location, a kindly, condescending assistant had said. As if the girl knew that Maria Grazia’s best friend from school was stuck in a dead-end job while the fledgling production director was hanging out with a film crew in Romania.

  And if she was there, she’d think her old friend was losing it. Roxana could imagine the intake of breath, the disbelieving laugh. ‘You mean, that’s the highlight of your day, Roxi?’ she’d say. ‘Some old guy failing to turn up to deposit his takings?’

  Not old, at least, not very, not much older than Roxana. Deep lines around his eyes, but then working at the Carnevale might have that effect on you. Not her type, even in a different line of work, she’d have to make that clear to Maria Grazia or she’d start matchmaking straight away. Though there was something about him … Otherwise why would his absence keep nagging at Roxana? Dark hair. Black, black eyes. Not always quite clean, not always close-shaven; there was nevertheless something about the Carnevale’s bagman, who no doubt had a name but Roxana had never learned it, that made you think twice. Something that made you wonder, or maybe, as Maria Grazia would undoubtedly say, You’ve got a bit too much time on your hands, Roxi, if you’re wondering about every customer that comes through the door. A tendency to daydream: perhaps that was why Roxana had never been promoted.

  There was a clatter at the little staff door behind Roxana, and a grunt, and Val was back, a tiny tin tray in his hand with two coffees on it and a ridiculously pleased expression on his big, stupid, handsome face. The coffee smelled good, Roxana had grudgingly to admit. She hadn’t felt like breakfast this morning
, waking in a sweat after a night of broken sleep, that neighbouring baby crying, the suffocating humidity, Mamma’s grumbling still turning over and over in her head, and a bitter taste in her mouth.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, downing the thimbleful and pushing back her chair. ‘God,’ she sighed, ‘I don’t remember it being this quiet last year.’

  Val shrugged. ‘Don’t knock it,’ he said with indifference, stacking the cups carelessly back on the tray, setting it down on her neat working surface and parking himself beside her. Spinning on the adjustable seat like a child at the barber’s. Roxana retrieved one of the cups as it tipped and threatened to spill its dregs. He set his big feet up on the counter in a parody of insolence. Val didn’t have a thesis or even a degree; he’d scraped through the Liceo Scientifico with a decent grade thanks to private tuition but had dug his heels in when university was suggested. He was simply too lazy.

  Val had got his job at the Banca di Toscana Provinciale because he was connected: his uncle was one of the directors. He might stay a sportellista all his life, too, but the thing was, Val didn’t really care. His mother – who worked all the hours God sent running a grocery-cum-wine bar – would keep him supplied with money, and business was booming, if Val’s appearance was any guide. All Val cared about was how he looked. He would spend the first half an hour of each morning brushing himself down after the ride in on his big Triumph, examining the creases in his sharp wool trousers, adjusting the angle of his tie.

  Roxana stood up abruptly, the tray in her hand: she’d wash up. She always did.

  ‘He hasn’t been in,’ she said, and even as she said it, she experienced a minute, sudden, unexpected nudge of panic. As if shining a light on this small and apparently inconsequential mystery might conjure up a whole world of unforeseen consquences: one tiny thing out of place, one idle, curious question asked.

  ‘Hasn’t been in?’ repeated Val stupidly. ‘Who hasn’t been in?’

  Dimwit. Val dealt with the bagman just as often as Roxana.

  ‘The Albanian.’ To her he was an ‘Albian’ – he might have been anything Eastern European. ‘From the – the cinema, with his cashbag. It’s Tuesday, and he hasn’t been in.’ Then, patiently as if she was talking to a slow child, ‘Every Tuesday since I’ve been here, eight-fifteen – or at least, between eight-twelve and eight-twenty – he comes in to make his deposit.’

  Val stared back at her. ‘Dunno,’ he said, and shrugged, but he was frowning. So maybe it really was odd if it had penetrated Val’s thick skull. Or maybe he just didn’t know what she was talking about.

  ‘Really,’ said Roxana, turning away with the tray but she felt that sharp little tweak of anxiety again. Kept her face impassive, shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s just that it’s August.’

  A porn cinema, in this heat. And these days there was the internet. Ugh.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Val indifferently. Then, with a child’s expression of transparent craftiness, ‘How about we bunk off early, then?’

  CHAPTER THREE

  EVEN LATER AS THE light faded and the heat refused to die in the stifling streets, as Sandro waited on the corner for Pietro, standing awkwardly with the gift in his hands, trailing gold ribbon and all, he couldn’t get her out of his head.

  Anna Niescu had not been what he expected.

  He had felt Giuli’s eyes on them every time she came back into the room, on one pretext or another; it had been like being a teacher or a doctor trying to coax a word out of a child, with a pushy parent hovering nearby.

  ‘Giuli,’ he’d said in exasperation on something like the fourth interruption – looking for the tax forms, she’d said, as if Giuli had any interest in her own tax code, let alone anyone else’s. Anna Niescu had stopped what she was saying and turned to smile that innocent, trustful smile at Giuli as she entered – as she’d done on the previous three occasions. Giuli her protector.

  A bit too protective. It was as if Giuli thought she needed an interpreter, as if she didn’t trust the girl – woman, Sandro supposed, as he now knew her to be twenty-eight years old, despite appearances – to speak her own mind, or possibly to be able to form a coherent sentence. Sandro himself, he had to admit, had had the impression before Anna Niescu spoke that she might be – simple. Too good for this world, as had used to be said of the backward child of every village; no doubt there was a term in modern psychology for it, but Sandro was quite happy not to know it.

  ‘Giuli tells me you can find him,’ Anna Niescu had said, smiling from Giuli to Sandro and back again, apparently unable to see the reluctance in his eyes, the anxiety in Giuli’s.

  Ironic, Sandro had thought, that these days such trustfulness is assumed to be the symptom of a psychiatric disorder of some kind. Faith. Sandro himself was long past churchgoing: he felt himself to be too dirtied by a life of policing – public servant, then private investigator, and he couldn’t have said which was dirtier – to summon up sufficient belief in a benevolent creator. Too much of a sinner himself, too. It wasn’t quite the same thing as being an atheist, though.

  ‘Well, I can try,’ Sandro had said with extreme wariness.

  He had been right about at least one of his assumptions about Anna Niescu. She was indeed looking for the father of her child. She referred to him as her fidanzato: her fiancé. Husband, Sandro had thought, would be the appropriate word under the circumstances, but then he was old-fashioned.

  ‘I know four days isn’t very long,’ she’d said apologetically. ‘But he’s not answering his phone. I called round at the apartment, on Sunday, then yesterday, and there was no answer.’

  She’d given him the address, on a scrap of paper: an apartment block out towards Firenze Sud, a decent neighbourhood, if not exactly picturesque, a place of Holiday Inns and comfortable modern housing and perhaps anonymity. Sandro had contemplated the image of this girl, this child, heavily pregnant, standing in the street in the heat and pressing despairingly on a doorbell. There was something biblical in the scene that Sandro resisted: she was no virgin. Only innocent.

  He’d imagined the guy, lying low, waiting for her to go away. Home would not be the place to catch him, would it?

  ‘So when did you last see him?’ he’d asked resignedly, overwhelmed by a sense, not unfamiliar to him, of his own uselessness in the face of fate, and women.

  ‘I saw him on Friday, about seven, after he finished work,’ she’d replied with bright obedience. ‘He came to see me after work as often as he could, with something. A cake, or something, to keep up my strength. He brought me flowers once.’

  Today was Tuesday. ‘On his way home?’ Sandro had asked gently. He had not pointed out to her that it was usual for a couple expecting their first child to be cohabiting, at least.

  Anna had smiled, still trusting, and Sandro had felt his gloom grow. ‘Yes,’ she’d said. ‘It’s not quite ready yet, you see. The apartment: he’s getting everything ready for the baby. And I live in, at the hotel. Since I was eighteen: it’s like home to me.’

  She was chambermaid and breakfast cook at the Loggiata Hotel. Sandro didn’t know it, though it was in San Frediano, not far from the office; he had wondered how much they could be paying her, to shuffle between the tables with brioche and coffee, to take hours over making beds, in her condition. He had returned the girl’s open gaze and thought, with a spark of fury: as little as they can get away with. And will she be out on the street, when the baby comes?

  A shabby, old-fashioned place, Giuli had said afterwards. ‘She might call it home, but you couldn’t have a baby there.’

  Anna Niescu had been gone an hour by then but the room still seemed to harbour her scent: sweet and spicy, soap and talcum powder and the heat of her skin.

  ‘Will they do anything for her, at the Centre?’ Giuli had just shrugged. Meaning, who knows? Meaning, they’ll do what they can, but it won’t be enough.

  ‘I’ve got a picture,’ Anna Niescu had said, almost the first word she’d spoken, scrabbling in her cheap bag and of
fering him not a photograph but a mobile phone. As she presented it to him with shy pride, Sandro had identified the phone immediately as a fake – a clone of an expensive make, the numbers beginning to erode, the metal trim peeling away in one corner. ‘Josef gave it to me.’

  ‘Josef?’ Not an Italian name: that would be Giuseppe.

  ‘Claudio Josef Brunello, but he called himself Josef.’ So part-Italian. ‘His grandmother was from – somewhere else. He did tell me, I just can’t remember it right now—’ And she had broken off. Abruptly her eyes had filled with tears and Sandro could imagine her, at eight or nine in school, unable to answer a question.

  ‘I don’t suppose it matters,’ he’d lied, patting her arm uselessly, trying to suppress the gloom settling over him at her scant knowledge of this man or the world, at her utter guilelessness. He had squinted at the small, indistinct image on the mobile. Almost hopeless: the two faces, hers and his, were pressed together on the tiny screen, the picture of extremely poor quality. All he had been able to tell was that the man had dark hair and eyes and was under fifty years old. He would also have said, from the angle of his head and body, from his slight, uneasy grimace, that, whilst beside him, her cheek against his, Anna was beaming, her fiancé wasn’t too happy about being photographed at all.

  Then she had looked from the picture to Sandro uncertainly, as if she had only just realized how little she had to go on. ‘He’s a good man,’ she’d said. ‘He’s educated, he’s got a proper job.’ Defensive. ‘He’s high up, in a bank, actually. And expecting a big pay rise, any day now.’

  ‘Really?’

  Trying to keep the scepticism out of his voice, Sandro had held the small screen up in front of him. Could this man be – respectable? Could he be for real? He’d tried to persuade himself he could – short-haired, the suit didn’t look too cheap – but no. He’d pulled himself up: it was a pipe dream – now these two women had got him at it. Hoping against hope.